Ben Hartley

Ben Hartley grew up in Mellor on the edge of the Peak District. A sickly child, he became deeply attached to the countryside and the life he found on his grandparents' farm. After leaving the Royal College of Art and teaching in Manchester for three years, he moved to Devon in 1960 with just a few hours teaching a week at Plymouth College of Art. In 1968 he converted to Catholicism. Constantly drawing and painting, he lived a solitary existence, always struggling with poor health and making little effort even to show his work. In the 1970s he was introduced to Bernard Samuels, director of Plymouth Arts Centre, who set about exhibiting and selling the work, while respecting the artist's obvious resistance to the idea of personal publicity. He spent the last years of his life in Presteigne, a small town on the Welsh border with Herefordshire. He died in 1996, bequeathing his work to Bernard Samuels - some 900 gouaches, mostly painted on brown paper, and over 300 notebooks full of beautiful drawings.
This is the first monograph on Ben Hartley. It covers the brief story of his very simple way of life, a dedicated Christian, devoted to country life and the art of the French post-impressionists, in particular Bonnard and Matisse. It is also a fascinating account of the relationship between an artist and a committed promoter of his work. It surveys the complete span of his work from his student years to the end of his life and shows throughout the close link between his notebooks and the paintings.