'If Mr Badmin is put first it is because he accepts more completely that the others the convention of line and wash … Mr Badmin makes no bones about his tone and the result is that drawings like "Mill Street W” and “The Season Commences – Richmond" give complete satisfaction.'
The Times, review of The Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours exhibition, Summer 1932
Saturday marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of the painter and etcher, Stanley Roy Badmin. It was fitting therefore that it also marked the opening of our latest exhibition, 'S R Badmin and the English Landscape'.
The Art of Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989) continues to grow in popularity, so that now, 37 years after his death in 1989, he may be considered the most significant traditional landscape watercolourist of the Post War generation. His intense and highly detailed watercolours are imbued with a sense of joy in the landscape and pleasure in urban bustle. It naturally places him firmly as a Romantic Topographer in the steps of the 19th Century greats such as Albert Goodwin, Alfred William Hunt and John William North. This growing reputation will be further enhanced by this fresh exhibition which is filled with a group of a hundred newly discovered artworks located in a Family Studio Archive.
Not only was he the star performer at the Winter and Summer exhibitions of the Royal Watercolour Society in the years 1932- 1984, but his alternative oeuvre has established a prevalence in the wider world, a consequence of many important commissions for his illustrative talents. Badmin’s images have inserted themselves into the collective cultural memory of the nation with large scale illustrations for the famous Shell Guides and the lithographic based Puffin books on ‘Trees’, ‘Town & Country’ and ‘Farm Crops’ , and of course the popular Odhams Nature books .
The large retrospective exhibition showcases all aspects of Roy Badmin’s art from detailed landscapes to his illustrations and a comprehensive body of etching.
It will be an impressive body of exquisite printmaking on display. An example of every one of the 40 or so prints will be brought together for the first time ever. This remarkable small parade of skill and dexterity was precociously wrought by Roy Badmin in his twenties.
When bust followed boom in the etchings market in the USA in 1930, this young unaffected artist’s response was to turn to available work as an illustrator; an area he made his own with distinctive flare and creativity.
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