Harold Edward Speed was born in London on 11 February 1872. His father was an architect, Edward Speed, and Harold was one of five sons.
In 1887 he began to study architecture at the Royal College of Art, but four years later moved to the Royal Academy to study painting. He received his first commission aged nineteen. In 1893 he was awarded a travel scholarship from the Academy. He then undertook a year-long painting tour of Europe, visiting many major cities such as Rome, Paris and Vienna.
In his final year at the Royal Academy he painted the mural Autumn, which remains in the café of the Royal Academy to this day.
Upon graduating in 1896, Harold Speed was elected member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. It was in this area that he became renowned, and quickly earned commissions from London’s elite. Around 1903 he was commissioned by Edward VII, after the King had seen his painting of a Maharajah and requested they meet at Buckingham Palace. The finished portrait was subsequently hung in the Royal Academy in 1905, and this was followed by his first solo-show at the Leicester Galleries in 1907.
Harold Speed was soon in consistent demand, painting prominent politicians and nobility of the early 20th century. He exhibited widely across the United Kingdom with countless societies and artists groups. Further afield, he was elected an associate member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and notably painted King Edward of Belgium in 1916.
Harold Speed also published practical handbooks for artists. These were The Practice and Science of Drawing (1913), The Science and Practice of Oil Painting (1924) and What is the Good of Art? (1936). He was elected as a Master of the Art Worker’s Guild in 1916, and taught for many years at Goldsmith’s College.
In 1920 he bought 23 Campden Hill Square, which had previously inspired the house in J M Barrie’s first novel, Peter and Wendy. He converted the back of the house into a studio, and one of his lodgers following the First World War was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1944, the property was damaged by a German doodle-bug bomb, and he spent the next eight years restoring the property and studio. He began to split his time between London and Oxford, while continuing to paint.
In 1953 Harold Speed first became unwell following a collapse at the Tate Gallery, and refers to a prolonged ‘illness’. His wife Clara died on 11 June 1954, at their home in London. He spent most of the final years of his life at his home Court Meadow in Oxford, where he mainly painted landscapes. He described this as 'so much less pressing and exhausting than portraits…One needs immense stamina for the sittings of a portrait.'
Harold Speed died on 20 March 1957 in London. The Royal Watercolour Society held a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1959. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum.
References from the British Newspaper Archive Daily News, 11 November 1952 Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 19 November 1954 Kensington News and West London Times, 18 June 1954 Northern Whig, 20 May 1959
Online Biographies Art UK, Artist Biographies, Burlington Gallery website
Further Reading Charles Henry Caffin, ‘The Art of Harold Speed’, Harpers New Monthly, December 1909
