Harold Squire was born at Quinta Esmeralda, Las Zorras, Valparaiso, Chile, and was one of the (probably five) children of Walter Squire, the director of a copper mining company, and his wife, Evelyn (née Pike). He arrived in England at the age of 10, probably to attend school at Haileybury, in Hertfordshire, as did at least one of his brothers, Geoffrey Pike Squire.
Squire studied first at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London; then – by 1901 – under Stanhope Forbes, in Newlyn, Cornwall; and latterly at the Académie Julian, in Paris.
He also received lessons from Augustus John and William Orpen. In 1917, Charles Marriott and Herbert Furst (the latter writing as ‘Tis’) would describe Squire as one of those ‘touched with [the] influence’ of Augustus John (Modern Art, New York: Frederick Stokes Co, 1917, page 49).
By 1910, Squire was living in an apartment on the fourth floor of 30 Tite Street, Chelsea, London, and working from a studio at the Riviera Studios, on the bank of the Thames at 136a Grosvenor Road. He began to exhibit with the New English Art Club in that year, and in the following one with the Friday Club (which had been founded by Vanessa Bell in 1905). Dorset became a favourite sketching ground from this time, and he also began to show landscapes painted in France and Italy.
In 1913, Vanessa Bell’s husband, the art critic, Clive Bill, bought a painting by Squire on behalf of the Contemporary Art Society. In the same year, Squire helped found the London Group (which had grown out of the Camden Town Group). However, he exhibited only in its first exhibition, held at the Goupil Gallery in March 1914 (and later in its 1928 retrospective). In the June, he, Lucien Pissarro and James Bolivar Manson marked their secession from the group by holding a show of their own – with Malcolm Milne and Diana White – at the Carfax Gallery. A notice of the show described him as a landscape painter of ‘romantic scenes treated unromantically’. A contribution to an exhibition of the Friday Club in 1915, entitled Decoration for Blue Room at 3 Sloane Court, suggests that he was also essaying interior design.
In this period, Squire contributed to two significant surveys of contemporary art: an ‘Exhibition of the Camden Town Group and Others’, which was held at Brighton Art Gallery in the winter of 1913-14, and ‘Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’, at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in the spring of 1914. Subjects included Gummer’s How (a Lake District hill) and several places in Italy: Bellagio, Venice, Capri and Vesuvius.
Nothing is known of his wartime service, but Squire was at Graylingwell War Hospital, Chichester, Sussex, in the years 1916-17. The War Office refused to release him when he was proposed as an official war artist.
Having exhibited with the New English Art Club since 1911, Squire was elected a member in 1919. In that year, he contributed pictures of Capri to a mixed exhibition at the Goupil Gallery (some of which were bought for Johannesburg Art Gallery). He also became a member of the Council of the new Arts League of Service, which was run by Ana Berry – who, like Squire, was born in Chile – and aimed, according to its motto, ‘to bring the Arts into Everyday Life’. Late in the year, the League mounted ‘The Exhibition of Practical Arts’ at the Twenty-One Gallery, which included a number of rugs handwoven to Squire’s designs, and a design by him ‘for Curtains for a Travelling Theatre’, no doubt for the League’s own touring players. The products that he designed were also sold at the League’s shop in the Adelphi (as were those by his friend, Malcolm Milne).
It was through the Arts League of Service that Squire met the architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh received a joint commission to design separate studio-houses for Squire, Francis Derwent Wood (sculptor) and Arthur Cadogan Blunt (glass artist), and a block of studio-flats for the League, all in Glebe Place, Chelsea. However, the only element of this project to be constructed was the studio-house for Squire at 49 Glebe Place, which was paid for by Squire’s sister, Mrs Evelyn Claude, who had married a Chilean coal magnate. He travelled to Buenos Aires in Argentina during its construction (probably to visit his 215 parents in Chile). On his return in 1921, he moved into Glebe Place – from nearby Church Street – with his housekeeper. It was the only work ever to be built in London by Mackintosh (who had a studio along the street at 43 Glebe Place). Given the control that Mackintosh liked to have over his designs, it is unlikely that Squire had a great degree of creative input in the project. Nevertheless, he sustained his own interest in decoration and, at the time, was helping to revive the art of marbling (as recorded in an article in House & Garden in 1921).
By 1926, Squire had left Glebe Place, and was probably living at 12 Edith Grove, a little further west along King’s Road. He had maintained a studio there – next to that belonging to Malcolm Milne – since the end of the First World War. In the same year, he acquired Springhead, a former mill in Fontmell Magna, a village situated south of Shaftesbury, in Dorset. There he created a garden with help from a local gardener, Harold Woolridge. However, in 1930, he lost his money on the stock exchange and had to sell the estate, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill being the buyer. He returned to 12 Edith Grove, in London, living there through most of the 1930s. In 1933, he travelled again to Buenos Aires (probably to visit his mother in Chile, who died in the following year).
By 1939, Squire must have recovered something of his financial stability (possibly as the result of an inheritance), for in that year he built The Hundred, a large house between Henfield and Woodmancote in Sussex, which became his home for the remainder of his life. He probably moved there to be close to Malcolm Milne, who had lived in Henfield since 1926.
In 1946, Squire was reported to have ‘been ill for some time’, but he lived on until 1959. He made a bequest of £1000 to the Artists’ Benevolent Fund to aid ‘young, needy artist painters’.
