Thomas James Carr was born into an affluent Belfast family on 21 September 1909. His father was a stockbroker and his parents represented the union between the Carr and Workman dynasties, with interests in stockbroking, banking, linen manufacture and shipping. His father, also Tom, and his mother, Mary Workman, of the Workman and Clark shipyard owners, encouraged him to draw and paint. As a boy, Tommy was taught by the Swiss painter Hans Iten (1874-1930) who had settled in Belfast. He also won backing from his maternal grandfather, a banker and keen amateur artist, who gave him a box of paints when he was recovering from illness and took him sketching. Carr was educated at Oundle School in Northamptonshire, which he disliked, although he improved his art and learned to shoe horses. His art masters were E M O’Rorke Dickey, a fellow Ulsterman and the portraitist Christopher Perkins. Carr left Oundle in 1926 and with the Perkins family, spent three weeks at Cassis, in the South of France. Perkins, Carr and another artist exhibited their sketches in the hotel. Only one was sold for ten pounds – by Carr, to a member of the Bensusan-Butt family, related to the French Pissarro dynasty by marriage. Encouraged by that event, Carr applied to the Slade, was accepted and his teachers included Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer. Among his contemporaries were the sculptor F E McWilliam and John Luke, later a teacher at Belfast College of Art. Carr concentrated on landscape, with Cezanne and Claude Lorraine as particular models. Tonks told him ‘If you look at any good landscape painters they’re also competent draughtsmen. You must learn to draw the figure.’ Carr concluded his studies at the Slade in 1929. His family then funded six months in Italy for him, where he stayed with Aubrey Waterfield in his medieval castle at Settignano, outside Florence. Carr visited I Tatti, home of the Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson. He later claimed that his host was away, the youngsters used an old panel by Duccio as a dartboard. Back in London, he slowly built a reputation showing at the Leicester Galleries, Redfern, Agnew’s and Wildenstein’s, where Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) bought his Beach Scene at Dover Beach on the recommendation of Kenneth Clark. He showed with his old Slade friends, such as Graham Bell, William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, Rodrigo Moynihan, Claude Rogers and Geoffrey Tibble. When the Objective Abstractionists held their show at Zwemmer’s Gallery in London in 1934, Carr – although essentially a realist, was rather oddly slotted in. Although he had flirted with non-representational art in his youth, Abstration was not his thing: ‘It was extremely difficult to sit in a studio with a bare canvas and not find myself wanting to paint at least something that was in nature.’ When he returned to live in Ulster, Carr found a use for more way-out pictures from that period and averred that they had been very useful ‘for re-roofing my beehives’. Carr found association with the Euston Road School of painting, started by Coldstream, Pasmore and Roberts in 1937, more sympathetic. Like his friend Anthony Devas, another excellent portraitist, he was an associate of that group of quiet objective realists. Settling at Newcastle, County Down, in 1939, Carr taught at a girls’ school and at Belfast College of Art, but mainly concentrated on becoming a widely shown painter. Typical subjects were people on benches, by the seaside, children playing, with cats and dogs much in evidence, all incidental to the farms, coastline and the Mountains of Mourne. From 1955 he lived in Belfast. Carr’s work was shown at the Royal Academy, the Royal Ulster Academy, the New English Art Club, the Royal Watercolour Society and, as an honorary member, the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 1973 he won the Royal Ulster Academy Gold Medal and in 1976 the Conor Award. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1991 from Queen’s University, and appointed OBE in 1993 for services to art in Ulster. When his wife died in 1995, Carr joined his daughter Ann and her husband at Itteringham in Norfolk and responded anew to the East Anglian countryside. A few years before he died, a picture by Carr appeared for sale in an auction room. It had been produced about 60 years earlier and depicted two nude female bathers in a sylvan setting, Stella, the future wife of the artist, and Wendy Blood, who eventually married Victor Pasmore. Carr bought it, but it was not marketable. So he simply added a dog and the picture sold in Belfast, where he was by then one of Northern Ireland’s most sought-after painters. Asked if he found painting hard work, Carr laconically replied: ‘Well, yes, but not as hard as cutting the grass.’ Tommy Carr died at Norwich on 17 February 1999.