Stephen Gilbert

Stephen Gilbert (15 January 1910 – 12 January 2007) was a British painter and sculptor. He was one of the few British artists fully to embrace the avante garde movement in Paris in the 1950s.

Gilbert was born in Wormit, in the north-east of Fife, Scotland, of English parents. His father was a commander in the Royal Navy; his grandfather, Sir Alfred Gilbert was the Art Nouveau sculptor of The Angel of Christian Charity in Piccadilly Circus.

He studied architecture at the Slade School of Art in London from 1929 to 1932, where he befriended fellow student Roger Hilton. Gilbert won the Slade Scholarship at the end of his first year, and the principal Sir Henry Tonks encouraged him to start painting from 1930. He also met sculptor Jocelyn Chewett at the Slade, and they were married in 1935.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1936, and put on an early solo show in London, at the Wertheim Gallery in 1938. He moved to Paris in 1937, where his wife studied under Ossip Zadkine, leaving before the Second World War. He failed a medical for military service, and he spent the war in Ireland near Dublin with his wife and son, Humphrey. He joined The White Stag group of refugee artists. His work was inspired by Masson, and by reading Jung, Nietzsche and Jakob Böhme, with fantastic creatures and plants painted in vivid colours.

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