Clifford Wilson Ellis was born in 1907 at Bognor in Sussex. He was educated at St Martin’s School of Art, the Regent Street Polytechnic and London University. Ellis became a graphic artist and illustrator, producing much of his output in collaboration with his wife, Rosemary Ellis. Together, they designed posters for Shell, The Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office, as well as London Transport. In the period 1945-82 they also designed nearly 100 book jackets for the New Naturalist Series, published by Collins. In the period 1933-34 the architect Oliver Hill designed an Art Deco style estate in the Essex town of Frinton-on-Sea – a showcase for modern British design, with architects being invited to design houses for the estate. His vision was only partially realised and the first building to be completed was the circular Frinton Park Estate Information Bureau in Cliff Way. Designed by Hill, it was initially used as the estate office and featured a mosaic of the estate layout on the floor designed by Ellis and produced by Poole Pottery. Ellis’s 1942 painting Here Lived Edmund Burke (the Bath Blitz damaged 19,000 buildings and killed more than 400 people) was presented via the Imperial War Museum, War Artists’ Advisory Committee, April 1946 and may be found in the British Government Art Collection. In 1946 the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court, in Wiltshire was established for the education of art teachers and Ellis was appointed principal. The grandeur of the establishment, the beauty of its setting, complete with peacocks and doves was breathtaking and it had its own resident ghost. Staff members included William Scott, Kenneth Armitage, Peter Lanyon, William Brooker, Jack Smith. Bryan Wynter, Bernard Meadows and Andrew Wilson. In those days, the teacher training course was a two year course and a third year was offered to students who it was thought would benefit from the opportunity to study their specialist subject for a further year. One of Ellis’s basic philosophies was that students and their tutors worked and socialised together on equal terms. He invited young artists to teach – and many would go on to become influential figures in the art world. William Scott, Terry Frost, Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Henry Cliffe were among them. The creative atmosphere at Bath Academy under Ellis has been compared to the Bauhaus at its most exuberant. Howard Hodgkin, who taught there, would later recall that it was: ‘a great trap for an artist as it becomes a substitute life.’ An inspirational figure, Ellis was often referred to as a ‘benevolent autocrat’; as indeed he was. James Tower, who taught Ceramics and Three Dimensional design there for 18 years would state: ‘Clifford’s philosophy was entirely an aesthetic one; to him the major values of life were aesthetic in nature, all that was beautiful and good to look at or to listen to was the justification of life, and it was the duty of the artist and teacher to spread these values throughout life.’ Clifford had in the early days associated with the Arts & Craft Movement which may well have instilled in him the virtues of aestheticism, as did his association with Walter Sickert in the 1940’s. Ellis would later say: ‘It was one of those flukes which doesn’t occur very often. I had been offered a job which was always thought of as a key job in my profession and it seemed a shame to abandon what we had started in Bath so it was a matter of finding somewhere in Bath with a bit more space than we had got then at Sydney Place and I realised that as people were beginning to come back from the war, anything that could be used as housing was going to be used as housing. Then it occurred to me that if we were going to be a residential art college we could do that just as well outside Bath as in it, so I made a mental note of likely places and Corsham Court was top of the list. I telephoned Lord Methuen and asked him what he was going to do when he got rid of the convalescent hospital from Corsham Court and he said he wished he knew, so we arranged to meet the next day and in those few hours of optimism when the war ended, the whole thing was fixed up in something like a week. It couldn’t have been done earlier and it couldn’t have been done later. So we offered ourselves as a place for students to come the following September, and they came, and we started.’ Ellis retired in 1972 and the art college returned to Bath in 1986 to become part of the Bath College of Higher Education. Ellis died 1985 at the age of 78.