Life
John Tunnard was born in Sandy, Bedfordshire, and educated at Charterhouse School. He studied design at the Royal College of Art (1919–1923). In 1926, he married a fellow student, Mary May Robertson.
During 1920s he worked in various textile design jobs in Manchester — for Tootal, Broadhurst, Lee & Co, the carpet manufacturers, H&M Southwell, and John Lewis Partnership. He took up painting seriously in 1928, and taught design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, from 1929.
In 1931 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and with the London Group, which he joined in 1934. In 1933 the Tunnards moved to Cadgwith, Cornwall, where they ran a business making printed silks. From the mid-1930s, he became friends with Julian Trevelyan, Henry Moore, John Betjeman and Humphrey Spender.
During World War II he was a conscientious objector, working briefly as fisherman in 1939, then as an auxiliary coastguard for the duration of the war.
From 1945 to 1965 he taught at the Penzance School of Art. He exhibited again at the Royal Academy in 1960, and was elected as an Associate in 1967. He died in Penzance in 1971.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The richest princes and the poorest beggars are to have one great and just judge at the last day who will not distinguish between them according to their ranks when in life but according to the neglected opportunities afforded to each. How much greater then, as the opportunities were greater, must be the condemnation of the one than of the other?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)