Bernard Arthur Ruston Carter was born at Kenilworth, Warwickshire on 15 October 1909. His father, who became a schools inspector and history textbook writer, wanted him to enter the diplomatic service. So Carter lived with a family in France and perfected French, before gaining a good degree in the languages tripos at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, followed by studies at Grenoble and Innsbruck Universities. Carter was already developing a passion for art and while at Cambridge, drew and created posters. With a small allowance, Carter studied cabinet-making, obtaining a City and Guilds School qualification. He also studied part-time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He was taught wood engraving by John Farleigh, other teachers being Fred Porter, William Roberts and Bernard Meninsky. Carter would later recall: ‘Meninsky would sit down and draw a figure, which showed you that you knew nothing and how brilliant he was.’ He began in the antique room with the painter John Cooper, who from the mid-1920s at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute had founded and run the East London Group which in the 1930s had a string of shows at the prestigious gallery Alex, Reid & Lefevre. Carter attended Cooper’s Bow drawing classes and showed with the Group. In the 1930s Carter met the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant, who was associated with the Euston Road School, founded in the autumn of 1937 and under the direction of Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream. According to art historian Bruce Laughton, Carter became one ‘of its most talented students’. The School’s strict realist ethic and obsessive system of measuring was a legacy that was to influence English art education for decades. A notable characteristic was the small registration marks left on the finished canvas, irritating to many viewers and particularly evident in the work of Coldstream and Euan Uglow, the latter a painter much admired and collected by Carter. These marks were covered over in his own work, even though a scrupulous sense of proportion underlies the paint. Carter would later say: ‘The Euston Road School ruined me. It made me cautious. You got to depend on the measuring and couldn’t do without it in the end.’ During the Second World War, Carter served with the Auxiliary Fire Service. Victor Pasmore, who had complained that his work was too ‘generalised’ when he was interviewed for Euston Road, helped him join the staff of the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1945. When Coldstream became Slade Professor of Fine Art at the UCL, Carter in 1949 was invited to join and remained for 30 years. Coldstream assembled a high-powered team at the Slade, including the art historians Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. Carter and Wittkower collaboratively published learned articles. Scholars had a high regard for Carter, who became an authority on perspective, contributing a long article on the subject for the 1970 Oxford Companion to Art. He became an expert on the work of the 15th-century Italian master Piero della Francesca, creator of some of the most serene images in Western art. Carter’s analysis and his plan of the geometry of works such as the The Flagellation, in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, won wide critical praise and informed generations of students. His teaching undoubtedly robbed him of easel time, but he continued to paint landscapes when he stayed in Somerset with his painter friend Robert Organ and elsewhere. As well as the East London Group and Euston Road School exhibitions, he contributed to the London Group and for years, his meticulous still-lifes were a feature of the RA Summer Exhibition. Carter just failed to get elected to the Academy although, in 1975, on the recommendation of Sir Tom Monnington, he was made Professor of Perspective at the RA Schools, a post held until 1983. In 1978, Carter married Jane Ford, a Cornwall-based painter who had studied at the Slade. Carter died at Mousehole in Cornwall on 18 March 2006. He is well-represented in notable public collections. One contemporary would observe: ‘In a world where art merit is commonly judged by price and media coverage, artists and teachers like B A R Carter get scant recognition. Yet a few shrewd peers know their worth. Several generations of students at leading London art schools benefited from ‘Sam’ Carter’s erudition, including many who have dominated British painting of the last half-century. If he had taught less, Carter would have been much better known as a painter.’