Edward Wadsworth

Edward Alexander Wadsworth
Wadsworth in 1916
Born	29 October 1889
Died	21 June 1949 (1949-06-22) (aged 59) Bayswater, London
Nationality	English
Known for	Painting
Movement	Vorticism

Edward Alexander Wadsworth ARA (29 October 1889 – 21 June 1949) was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism. He painted, often in tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life. He was also an engraver on wood and copper. In the First World War he was involved in transferring dazzle camouflage designs onto ships for the Royal Navy, and after the war he continued to paint nautical themes.

Wadsworth was born on 29 October 1889 in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, and was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh. He studied engineering in Munich between 1906 and 1907, where he studied art in his spare time at the Knirr School. This provoked a change of course, as he attended Bradford School of Art before earning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, London. His contemporaries at the school included Stanley Spencer, CRW Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and David Bomberg.

Wadsworth's work was included in Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionism Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, 1912, in London, but he changed allegiance shortly after through friendship with Wyndham Lewis, and exhibited some futurist-derived paintings at the Futurist Exhibitions at the Doré Gallery. Although a member of the committee that organised a dinner in honour of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1913, he was one of a number of British painters in the nascent avant-garde that became increasingly disenchanted with the Italian's arrogance. By June of the following year, he was in a group of artists, including Lewis, who jeered Marinetti's public performance of The Battle Of Adrianople. He was a signatory of the Vorticist Manifesto published in BLAST the next month, and also supplied a review of Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art and images to be reproduced in the magazine.