Douglas Percy Bliss was born in Karachi, then within British India, on 28 January 1900, the son of the pharmacist, Joseph Bliss, and his wife, Isabel Douglas (née Percy). His paternal grandfather had moved from Northamptonshire to Morayshire, in Scotland, and that is where his father was born, so Bliss always considered himself to be Scottish.
Bliss was brought up in Edinburgh, and was educated at George Watson’s College (1908-18).
Having been a member of the Officers’ Training Corps during his later years at school, he served in the 4th Highland Light Infantry in 1918, during the last year of the First World War, latterly as a Lieutenant Corporal.
In 1918, Bliss entered the University of Edinburgh to read Rhetoric and English Literature. However, he also took the one-year course in Art History offered by Gerard Baldwin Brown, the Professor of Fine Art, which sparked his lifelong interest in art and architecture, and earned him the Fine Art Medal.
Following his graduation in 1922, Bliss moved south to London to study at the Royal College of Art. He intended to join its Design School, to prepare to become an illustrator, but was persuaded by the Principal, William Rothenstein, to enter its Painting School. He was a member of a famous cohort, which also included the Design School students, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, both of whom would become close friends. He also befriended the fellow painting student, Phyllis Dodd, who had arrived at the college a year earlier, and who would eventually become his wife. During his post-graduate year, he became editor of the student magazine. He also joined Bawden and Ravilious in attending Sir Frank Short’s Saturday morning classes in engraving and, encouraged by Paul Nash (who taught in the Design School on Wednesdays), mastered wood-engraving, which proved to be an ideal medium for his talents. For some of this time, he shared lodgings with Bawden at 58 Redcliffe Road, and then space with Ravilious at 38 Holbein Studios.
In 1925, Bliss made use of wood-engravings to illustrate Border Ballads, his first book, which was published by the Oxford University Press. Its success led to a number of further illustrative commissions, including Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (Dent, 1926), James Mabbe’s translation of stories by Cervantes (OUP, 1928), William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (Cresset Press, 1929), his own selection of Scottish stories entitled The Devil in Scotland (Maclehose, 1934) and Edgar Allan Poe’s Some Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Penguin, 1938). He was also commissioned to write what would become A History of Wood-Engraving (J M Dent, 1928), which was instigated by Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, who also wrote its foreword. It received such acclaim – and is still regarded as an essential work on the subject – that Bliss’s reputation as a critic somewhat overshadowed his reputation as a creative artist.
Nevertheless, Bliss’s wider creativity was certainly not stifled. In the autumn of 1927, he held his first exhibition, with Bawden and Ravilious, at the St George’s Gallery, George Street, Hanover Square. Mainly focussing on watercolours, it included his first landscapes of Barra, an island in the Outer Hebrides, which he returned to on many occasions, and which inspired some of his finest works. Encouraged to pursue painting by Phyllis Dodd, who was herself a painter, he continued to produce landscapes and townscapes in oil and watercolour throughout his career.
In 1928, Bliss married Phyllis Dodd in her birthplace of Chester, and they lived first at 65 Sancroft Street, Lambeth, before moving to Blackheath in 1932, and settling at 38 Lee Park. They would have two daughters, Prudence, who became an art historian, and Rosalind, an artist and teacher. They were joined in Blackheath by Bliss’s widowed mother, Isabel (and she would remain in the household until her death in 1966). Inspired by the area in various ways, he painted views over his extensive back garden, and, in 1937, became the co-founder, and first secretary, of the Blackheath Society, in order to protect its environment and architecture. One of his two most important London teaching positions was at Blackheath School of Art (where his subject was illustration). The other was at Hornsey School of Art (where he became Head of Art Teaching).
Bliss was elected to the Society of Wood Engravers (1934) and the Royal Society of British Artists (1939), and also exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Scottish Academy and the New English Art Club. During the 1930s and 40s, he held solo shows at the Lefevre Gallery and the Leger Galleries, both in London. These included two in which he presented series of comic watercolour drawings of ‘Artists in their Studios’. The first, entitled ‘Humorous Drawings: Botticelli to Renoir’, took place at the Lefevre Gallery in 1934. The second, entitled ‘Masterpieces in the Making’, took place at the Leger Galleries in 1937. Many of these images were reproduced in The Sketch. Bliss had been appointed the London art critic of the Scotsman in 1928, and during the 1930s also contributed to The Listener, The Print Collectors’ Quarterly and The Studio.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939, Bliss volunteered for the RAF Reserve, and was sent to an officer training centre in Uxbridge. Two years later, he was called up and stationed by the RAF at Felixstowe, where he did a radar course. Appointed to a branch of the Air Ministry that dealt with concealment and decoy, he served in Brighton and Bournemouth early in 1942, before moving to Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, to work at a decoy site intended to simulate a city. In 1943, he moved to Hoghton Tower, Lancashire, where mock tanks were being made. From later that year, and for the remainder of the war, he worked at the Camouflage and Decoy Unit based at Pinewood Studios.
Following bombing on their home in Blackheath in 1940, Bliss and his family had moved to an apartment in Garden House, Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington. Then, in 1945, at the end of the war, they left London for Derbyshire, and settled at Hillside Cottage, Windley. Soon afterwards, Bliss was appointed Director of Glasgow School of Art, and took up the post in September 1946. Hillside was kept for holidays – often spent in painting – until he retired there in 1964.
Under Bliss’s directorship of Glasgow School of Art, design regained its importance. Three new departments of Interior, Textile and Industrial Design were created, with fully equipped workshops, and those subjects were raised to Diploma status. He also succeeded in encouraging artists from London to teach at the school, including Gilbert Spencer. At the time that he left his position, the school was listed in Whitaker’s Almanack as among the highest-ranking art schools in Britain.
While in Glasgow, Bliss did much to promote the architecture of Glasgow, and especially to save the buildings and furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and enlisted such figures as John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner to his campaign.
During his Glasgow years, Bliss continued to paint on the Isle of Barra, and also travelled to Denmark, Sweden, Italy and other European countries (probably to prepare for the visits of his students on travel bursaries).
In 1964, the year that he retired from Glasgow, Bliss received an Hon DA from Manchester College of Art. Soon after he settled at his cottage in Derbyshire, he became a governor of Derby School of Art. During his retirement, he continued to paint, and also produced a monograph on Edward Bawden (1979), which rehearsed the excitement of his own student years.
From 1980, his was work was celebrated in a number of retrospectives and other exhibitions. In that year, he held both a show of ‘Watercolours and Wood Engravings’ at Blond Fine Art, London (alongside work by Clifford Webb), and a solo show of ‘Paintings, Watercolours & Wood Engravings’ at the Alpine Club Gallery. In 1981, a retrospective was held at the Hatton Gallery, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Then, in 1983, a joint show of work by Bliss and his wife, Phyllis Dodd, was shown at St Michael’s Gallery, Derby.
Douglas Percy Bliss died in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, on 11 March 1984.
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the National Galleries of Scotland.
Further reading:
Malcolm Yorke, Gargoyles & Tattie-Bogles: the lives and work of Douglas Percy Bliss and Phyllis Dodd, Huddersfield: Fleece Press, 2018;
John Milner, ‘Bliss, Douglas Percy (1900-1984)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/38940
