Michael Rothenstein [1908-93] was the son of the celebrated artist Sir William Rothenstein and studied at the Central School of Art from 1924 to 1927. In the mid 1940s, after an early career as a landscape watercolourist, he embarked upon his career as a printmaker. From the early 1960s he exhibited widely, both in the provinces and abroad, and established a world wide reputation as one of the most distinguished British printmakers of the twentieth century. His direct, dramatic work in powerful colour, ranged from the intense depiction of everyday scenes to the portrayal of certain iconic images such as the cockerel. The latter he used to ironic effect in his print of New York City.
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi was born in 1924 in Leith, Scotland, of Italian parents. He trained at Edinburgh College of Art and, in the late 1940s, worked in Paris where he met Giacometti, Arp, Braque and Léger and was influenced by Surrealism. In the following decade he taught in various London art colleges and exhibited in London, New York and the Venice Biennale. In the late 1960s he taught both at Berkeley and the RCA and then spent some time in Berlin. From 1977 to 1981 he was Professor of Ceramics at the Fachhochschule, Cologne, when he was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. He was knighted in 1988 and died in April, 2005.
Edward Burra [1905-1976], painter, draughtsman and stage designer, studied at Chelsea Polytechnic 1921-3, and at the RCA 1923-25. He suffered chronic ill health from childhood and lived most of his life at his parent’s house near the Sussex town of Rye. In the late 1920s, his friend Paul Nash introduced him to the work of George Grosz, an artist who had a considerable influence upon his artistic development. He also travelled - despite his poor health - to Paris, Marseilles and New York, and spent much of the time in bars, nightclubs, dance-halls and cinemas from which he drew inspiration for his paintings. The latter were almost always in watercolour and, later in his career, large in scale. He visited Mexico in 1938 and, affected by the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, increasingly painted sombre, menacing compositions suggesting cruel religious rites. His illustrations, and his sets and costumes for various ballets were very successful. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Hayward Gallery in 1985.
Graham Sutherland [1903-80] was educated at Epsom College and studied art at Goldsmith's School of Art. He was particularly drawn to printmaking, which he taught at Chelsea School of Art from 1928 to 1940. Sutherland's early work was characterised by an exacting representationalism, which evolved into Surrealism, and he was a noted contributor to the 1936 International Surrealism Exhibition in London. From 1941-44 he was employed as an official war artist, and his work from that period provides a factual and evocative record of desolation. His "thorn period" began with the "Crucifixion" [1946] for St. Mathew's Church, Northampton, and vibrated throughout his later totemic imagery involving anthropomorphic insect and plant forms.
Victor Pasmore [1908-98] was born in Surrey, the son of a distinguished doctor, and educated in the 1920s at Harrow. After school he moved to London to work for the LCC, whilst pursuing his artistic endeavours on a part time basis. In the late 1930s, and with the assistance of Kenneth Clark [newly appointed Director of the National Gallery], he became a full time painter and teacher at the Euston Road School. In the early 1940s he married and, towards the end of the decade, moved to Blackheath, an area to which he returned after a spell as Director of Painting in the University of Newcastle. From the mid 1960s he exhibited widely on both sides of the Atlantic and also bought a house and studio in Malta.
David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937. He is known for his satirical paintings, his masterly prints and drawings, and his penetrating portraits of contemporary personalities. His works from the 1960s, such as his series featuring Los Angeles swimming pools and their denizens—are painted in a bright and deliberately naive style, and their subject matter is drawn from popular culture. At the end of the 1960s, he adopted a more naturalistic manner, particularly in his portraits and although not fully realistic, these works—painted in his preferred style of flat acrylic paints and profuse finely drawn lines—provide sensitive, often heightened, representations of their sitters. Hockney's notable designs for operatic productions, for both the Glyndebourne Opera and for New York City's Metropolitan Opera, have met with critical and popular favour.
John Piper [1903-92] was a prolific painter, printmaker, writer and decorative designer. His early work was abstract, but in the 1930's he turned to a romantic naturalism. During the second world war he was a commissioned war artist and depicted the results of air raids on Britain. In his "Eye and Camera" series Piper explored, in the Pop Art vernacular, the effects of repeated images and bold colour based on photographs of his wife, Myfanwy. He is well known for his watercolours and aquatints of buildings - such as those depicting Windsor Castle - and for his stained glass for both Coventry and Llandaff Cathedrals.
Gordon House was born in Pontardawe, Glamorgan, in 1932. He studied at Luton and St Albans Schools of Art from 1947 until 1950, and from the early 1950’s worked in an advertising agency and as an assistant to an ecclesiastical sculptor. He was a designer for Imperial Chemical Industries from 1952 until 1959 and then a graphic designer for Kynoch Press. From the early 1960’s he pursued his own artistic work, whilst teaching part-time at the Central School of Art, St Albans and Hornsey Schools of Art and Luton College of Technology. From then on, Gordon House established himself as printmaker, painter, designer, typographer and teacher of real quality and distinction.
Allen Jones was born in 1937 and studied painting and lithography from 1955 to 1961 at Horsney College of Art. In 1960 he was expelled from the Royal College of Art and between 1961 and 1963 he taught lithography at Croydon College of Art. His work in the early sixties was influenced by psychology and by his reading of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. In 1964 he moved to New York and travelled throughout the USA. In 1969 he made the sculptures Table Sculpture and Hat Stand, and from 1968 to 1970 he was Guest Lecturer at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. In 1977 he was Guest Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in the summer of the same year, Visiting Director of Studies in painting and drawing at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada. In 1986 he was made R.A.
ew informed observers would question the statement that "image is all". Indeed, as Oscar Wilde once remarked, "only the deeply superficial would suggest otherwise". 
And an image is aesthetically enriching when it triggers a creative response within the observer … such is the dynamic of great art. A dynamic, moreover, which is epitatically realised in the "chamber music" of fine print - for in that genre, specifically, graphic artists have quintessentialized their vision. We are privileged, therefore, to present to our discriminating customers, a range of limited edition prints by fourteen leading artists of the 20th century.
Joan Miró [1893-1983] is one of Spain's foremost artists. He studied at Barcelona's Gali Art Academy and his earlier work was influenced by fauvism, cubism and surrealism. The Spanish Civil War, during which he was exiled to France, was the catalyst for the intense work he exhibited at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. He returned to Spain in 1940 when France was invaded. One year later the first retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1947 Miró visited New York and worked at Stanley William Hayter's transplanted Atelier 17, learning etching techniques. Miró's calligraphy shows strong Oriental affinities, and stars and birds are magical symbols that appear throughout his work. In 1975 the Miró Museum was opened in Barcelona.
Andy Warhol [1928-1987] was born in Pittsburgh of Czechoslovakian parents. In 1954 he left school with a high school diploma and between 1945 and 1949 he studied pictorial design. The 1950s was devoted to designing stage sets, dyeing his hair straw-blond and moving into a house in Lexington Avenue with his mother and several cats. In 1962 he produced his silkscreen prints on canvas of Campbell's Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, etc. Later he produced the first record of the rock band "the Velvet Underground" and between 1966 and 1968 made several films with them. In 1968 he was shot and dangerously wounded by Valerie Solanis. He also made his first movie for the cinema, Flash, with Paul Morissey - which was followed by Trash in 1970. In 1987 he died as a result of an operation.
Elisabeth Jean Frink [1930-93] was born in Suffolk and was best known for her monumental figurative bronzes. She studied at the Guildford School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art and captured wide attention very early in her career, with works of rough textured warriors and menacing birds. In the 1960s, she created a series of enormous goggled heads, which were the first in a long series honouring the victims of human oppression and torture. Frink was also a noted teacher and lectured both at the Chelsea and St. Martin's Schools of Art and illustrated classic books, including Aesop's Fables, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Homeric epics.
R. B. Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932 and studied art at the Cooper Union in New York and at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. Then in 1958, and after some military service, he settled in England and studied at the Royal College of Art where he was associated with the beginnings of the Pop Art movement in the early 1960's. However his painterly brushwork, which recalled Abstract Impressionism, together with his complex figurative imagery with its wealth of historical, artistic, literary and political references, set him apart from his contemporaries. Ronald Brooks Kitaj continued to exhibit widely throughout the 1960's and 1970's, whilst teaching in a number of art schools.
Henry Moore [1898-1986] the son of a Yorkshire coal miner, was born in Castleford and studied art and sculpture at both Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art. His organically shaped, abstract, bronze and stone figures, constitute the major 20th century manifestation of the humanist tradition in sculpture, and among his major commissions were sculptures for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the Lincoln Center in New York. Shortage of materials in the early years of WWII forced Moore to concentrate on drawing and he began his shelter drawings from the London Underground in 1940. He also made drawings of Yorkshire miners, Stonehenge, sheep and an elephant's skull, as well as domestic scenes.
