Ruskin Spear was born in Hammersmith in 1911.
He won a scholarship to Hammersmith School of Art and then another
in 1931 to the Royal College of Art, where he studied under Gilbert
Spencer amongst others. Some of the artist's early work was shown
together with Carel Weight's at the Picture Hire Gallery. Spear first
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1932 and was elected a full member
in 1954. He taught at the RCA from 1948 to 1975. His work features
in a number of major collections, including the Tate Gallery.
But perhaps Ruskin Spear's most
typical expression of his warmth of feeling, his powers of observation
and his deep, if detached, understanding of humanity and the environment
in which he has lived and worked all his life, are to be found in
his studies of the ordinary people of West London going about their
business, or captured in unguarded moments of relaxation. The streets
and pubs and snooker halls of Hammersmith, Chiswick, Shepherd's Bush,
Fulham and Putney are the areas he knows and loves. The Hampshire
Hog in King Street and the Ravenscourt Arms, both in Hammersmith,
have always been for the artist the epitome of all the 'local' means
to its regulars. Snug and happy, gregarious or sometimes lonely, they
provide for a while a safe world of mahogany and brass, a stage lit
by the glitter and sparkle of glasses and bottles repeated to infinity
in the frosted engraved mirrors. This is the Olympus of the working-man.
The décor is often dull: browns, dark reds and greens; some
areas lit, some in shadow. Pools of light and dark hold the habitués
like fish, clutching their pints and nibbling at cigarette butts.
The low tones of many of Ruskin Spear's pub pictures recall some of
Sickert's paintings of the Old and the New Bedford Music halls.' Mervyn
Levy, Ruskin Spear, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985.
