John Pelham Napper was born in London on 17 September 1916. He was the son of an opera singer mother and an actor and water-colourist father. John He was educated at Frensham Heights, Surrey, and at the Dundee School of Art. He entered the Royal Academy Schools and then became a pupil of the distinguished portrait painter Sir Gerald Kelly. At the end of every day, he had to clean the brushes Kelly had used, frequently a hundred or more of them. That way, Kelly said, Napper would learn more about technique than by watching him paint. However, his time with Kelly was not wasted. 1935 Napper married Hedvig Sophie Armour (the marriage later being dissolved). During the Second World War, Napper was appointed Official War Artist on the staff of Ceylon Command. In 1945 he married Pauline Davidson who would become his lifelong muse, model, companion and inspiration. After the war, Napper taught for a time at St Martin’s School of Art, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Peter Kinley and Sheila Fell. His gift for society portraiture (‘girls in pearls’ as he called them) led to many commissions including portraits of Lady (Clementine) Churchill and The Queen (1953). He described his studio in Chelsea, London, as having become ‘like a doctor’s waiting room, with one sitter in the morning and another in the afternoon.’ Napper’s dissatisfaction with the life of a fashionable portrait painter led to him moving to Paris in 1957, where he took a studio in La Ruche (the Beehive), in outer Montparnasse. The poverty, alcoholism and severe depression he suffered, was reflected in his work. He then moved to Brittany, where his mood lifted and he befriended the Cubist artist Georges Braque. Napper then moved to the United States, where he was visiting professor of art at for a year at the University of Southern Illinois, but Napper saw art schools as ‘the absolute damnation of painting’. In 1972 he settled in Shropshire in a farmhouse on the estate of his friend the Earl of Plymouth. His love of the English countryside, and his happiness at having settled there after so many years abroad, led to a fruitful period in which he produced some of his best work. His series of 21 watercolours, Notes for a Modern Mythology (1993), displayed the artist’s disaffection with contemporary urban existence in a humorous, but rather bitter style, which owed something to a surprising influence – the American underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose work Napper greatly admired. Other influences such as Giorgione, Poussin and Piero della Francesca are detectable in his re-inventions of classical subject matter, and inspired by Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji, Napper completed a series of 37 watercolours of Titterstone Clee, the majestic hill above his home near Ludlow (1994). The Prince of Wales became one of Napper’s most enthusiastic collectors, and in 1996 Napper painted his portrait. He said of it: ‘I particularly wanted to express that aspect of the Prince which is shown by his profound interest in all the arts and his deep concern for humanity. I have also wanted to avoid, as much as possible, the pitfalls so often associated with royal portraiture these days. I have tried to make it not only an interesting portrait but also a beautiful object. As beautiful as I am capable of making it.’ Napper’s strengths were the traditional qualities of sound craftsmanship; he was a keen observer and a skilled draughtsman, with an unerring sense of colour and harmony. His influences were as wide ranging as Japanese traditional prints and woodcuts – particularly Hokusai – Giorgione, Poussin, Piero della Francesca and the inimitable Robert Crumb. Napper was awarded a silver medal at the Paris Salon in 1947, a prize at the Moscow International Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1957 and the International Association of Art Critics Prize in London in 1961 and his paintings are represented in public and private collections in Britain and abroad. His last commission, at the instigation of the Prince of Wales, was the design of a strained glass window for the chapel of St James’s Palace. John Napper died at the age of 84 at Ludlow, Shropshire on 17 March 2001.