Stanley William Hayter was born at Hackney in London, on 27 December 1901. He was the son of the painter William Harry Hayter. Stanley was educated at Whitgift Middle School in Croydon. He then worked as a research chemist in the laboratory of the Mond Nickel Company. Concurrently, he was enrolled as a part-time student in chemistry at Kings College, London. At the end of the Great War, Hayter became a full-time student at King’s, received a degree in chemistry and geology and then worked in Abadan for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company 1922-25. During that posting, he commenced a series of pencil portraits of colleagues’ of which about 150 were completed. His paintings of this period were mostly landscapes, rivers, seascapes, boats and the oil refinery plant. Hayter returned to England to convalesce from an attack of malaria, His company arranged a one-man show at their corporate headquarters of the paintings and drawings he had made while overseas and most of the paintings were sold. That exhibition’s success convinced Hayter to pursue a career as an artist. In 1926 he travelled to Paris, where he studied briefly at the Académie Julian. He made friends with Giacometti, Balthus, Calder and Anthony Gross. That same year, he met Polish printmaker Józef Hecht 1891-1951), who introduced him to copper engraving using the traditional burin technique. Hecht also assisted Hayter to acquire a press for starting a printmaking studio for artists young and old, experienced and inexperienced, to work together in exploring the engraving medium. In 1927 Hayter opened the studio and by the end of the year, there were ten people working in the atelier. It was moved to a larger location at the Villa Chauvelot where it stayed until 1933. That year, it moved it to No. 17, Rue Campagne-Première, where it became known as Atelier 17. Artists such as Miró, Picasso and Kandinsky collaborated on fund-raising print editions to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to fund the Communist cause. In 1929 Hayter had his first one-man exhibition in London at the Claridge Gallery. He exhibited with the Surrealist group in Paris in 1933 and continued to exhibit with them throughout the 1930′s. He left the movement when Paul Eluard was expelled. Eluard’s poem Facile Proie (1939) was written in response to a set of Hayter’s engravings. Other writers with whom Hayter collaborated included Samuel Beckett as well as Georges Hugnet. In 1936 Hayter helped to organise the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In the second half of the 1930s Hayter was in frequent contact with Picasso and gave him technical assistance. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Hayter moved Atelier 17 to New York City According to James Kleege, ‘In reality, the Atelier 17 was wherever Bill Hayter was’. There it became an important meeting place for both European and American artists. Hayter also acted as adviser to the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition Britain at War. Hayter’s training as a chemist gave him an unrivalled knowledge of the technical aspects of printmaking, on which he wrote two major books, New Ways of Gravure (1949) and About Prints (1962). Atelier 17 returned to Paris in 1950. Hayter continued to develop painting alongside printmaking. His interest in automatism led him to associate with the Surrealists, and in the United States he was an innovator in the Abstract Expressionism movement. Hayter was appointed OBE in 1951 and also to the Légion d’honneur. He was chosen to represent Great Britain at the 1958 Venice Biennale. He was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1967 and received a CBE in 1968. Hayter died at the age of 86, in May 1988, at his home in Paris. Although Hayter’s historical importance has long been acknowledged (probably no modern British artist has been so influential internationally), he was uninterested in self-promotion and his work was little exhibited in his lifetime. However, his obituary in the Guardian newspaper described him as ‘by far the finest British printmaker of this century’. His prints are varied in technique and style, but most characteristically are influenced by the abstract vein of Surrealism and are notable for their experiments with texture and colour. Among the artists he is credited with influencing were Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.