Charles Ernest Oakley was born into a naval family at Urmston, Manchester on 29 November 1925. He was the son of an engineer and won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School. In the early years of the Second World War, while youth hostelling in the Lake District, Oakley came upon the crash site of two Hurricane fighters at Coniston Old Man. A dead pilot lay by the wreckage of one of the planes. The scene was only exorcised from his mind when he sketched it out on paper and coloured it. He then served with the Royal Artillery in India. In 1947 Oakley appeared at the Slade in his ‘demob’ suit for his interview with Randolph Schawabe, with no portfolio or sketchbook, but clutching his one watercolour of the above event and gained entry. His tutors, William Townsend and William Coldstream brought such figures as Francis Bacon, Wyndham Lewis and David Sylvester to the Slade to look over the students’ work. Oakley’s studies in the Antique Room won him the Taylor and Melvill Nettleship awards, as well as the Wilson Steer medal for Northern Landscape. He attended the British School in Florence in 1950 and married Ann Waddell in 1951. The path from the Slade and the RCA to the NEAC was still open in those days and Oakley showed industrial scenes at two of its exhibitions, before moving north to become an art master at Eden School in Carlisle. There, he came to the notice of the textile printing firm Ferguson Fabrics and was appointed assistant head designer. He did the job for seven years, but became bored with ‘putting rose buds on knickers’. In 1957 his first solo exhibition was held at the Crane Kalman Gallery, Manchester, and was opened by L S Lowry. Lowry purchased one of his pictures and it would be a matter of profound regret for Oakley in later years that his economic circumstances at that time did not permit him to reciprocate the gesture. Thereafter, he showed regularly in Manchester, being much praised for his ‘poetry in paint’. In 1962 he was appointed Senior Lecturer at Belfast College of Art. In shows at the Caldwell Gallery in Belfast, his intense, claustrophobic interiors were juxtaposed with the wide expanses of Donegal where the Oakley family had a summer cottage. Some years later, as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley were emerging as the poetic voices of Ulster, the critic William Feaver praised the ‘mortuary effect’ of the painter’s ‘leaky skies’ and ‘peat trenches’. Oakley might easily have been typecast as an Irish landscapist of a conventional kind. However, hints of Edward Hopper and ‘magic realism’ began to creep into his painting and around the time of his return to England in 1974, he became interested in working in three dimensions – ‘dabbling in construction work’ and experimenting with trompe l’oeil. Repeated visits to the Dutch museums instilled admiration for Vermeer, Terborch and Metsu, and took him back to his Slade School exercises in mathematical perspective. In 1982, on a student trip, he visited the 360 degree Mesdag Panorama in The Hague which was re-examined in a series of works – as were the methodical approaches of Thomas Eakins and George Stubbs. These and the Dutch masters became his new subject matter in what were described as ‘works with romantic and historical associations’, in the first of three exhibitions staged at Pyms Gallery, London in 1984, which led to touring shows, in galleries in Hull, York, Kendal and Belfast. He then turned his attention to Scott and Oates of the Antarctic and Mallory and Irvine on Everest which led him to produce the Antarctic Triptych (1984) and the Quarter Rupee Triptych (1986) in which the intrepid teams of explorers and mountaineers posed for famous photographs. Oakley retired in 1984 to paint full-time. By the early nineties, other austere themes suggested themselves. The discovery of a monument to Roger Casement, the death of Baron von Richthofen and new interpretations of Balthus, Winslow Homer and Magritte were added to the repertoire in his later years, when two further solo shows were staged at Castleside Gallery, Cockermouth, in 1996 and 2000. In 1999 Oakley won the Singer Friedlander/Sunday Times watercolour prize with The Thomas Eakins Gallery. He continued working until his late seventies, when his eyesight began to fail. Thereafter, he spent his mornings in the studio, listening to Radio 3 and reading, surrounded by the work of a lifetime. Oakley died at Carlisle on 1 April 2008.