Leonard Rosoman

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2002

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Leonard Rosoman's career saw him travel the world as an Official War Artist in the Second World War. He is also a member of the Royal Academy, an illustrator and teacher. The young Leonard dodged the family business by getting a scholarship to the Edward VII School of Art in Durham and went on to paint and teach. When war broke out Leonard was drafted into the Auxiliary Fire Service in London but he didn't stop painting, and he used his experiences to create some of his finest work. This drew him to the attention of the Home Office, and Sir Kenneth Clarke asked him if he would be an Official War Artist. He agreed and was appointed an official war artist to the Admiralty and was posted to the British Pacific Fleet. In April 1945 was posted to Sydney and from there he joined HMS Formidable.

After the war Leonard went back to teaching, first in London then to Edinburgh College of Art in 1948, and later on to the Royal College of Art where he met his most memorable student - David Hockney: "I didn't find him at all difficult, but it was a little bit scary because if anybody ever had something written on his forehead, he had. Every single member of that staff pretty well guaranteed that when David left, he would be a success of some kind. He was a very rare bird - he had a quality of understatement - rare and important in its way."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: I Got A Gal in Kalamazoo by Glenn Miller & his Orchestra Book: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Luxury: A sloping lawn

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an artist. He'd begun to make a living teaching and illustrating when at the outbreak of World War II he joined the auxiliary fire service.
0:39.0	Here his talent burst into life as he painted what he saw, burning buildings, smoke and fire, all of which
0:45.8	led to his being commissioned as an official war artist. Now it was the drama of combat that
0:51.2	his paintings recorded, capturing with careful stillness the
0:55.0	foreboding of men and machinery preparing to kill. After the war he returned to
1:00.0	teaching, painted murals and theatrical sets, and more recently decorated the ceiling of Lambeth
1:05.2	Palace Chapel. A fine draftsman with a love of colour and size, he's today one of the oldest
1:11.3	members of the Royal Academy. Looking back he says the vulnerability
1:15.5	of life the precariousness of it has been a vitally important part of my work. He is
1:20.8	Leonard Rosamond. The fragility of life, Leonard, is most obvious, of course, in your
1:26.8	wartime painting and perhaps most of all in one of the most famous which is in the Imperial
1:31.9	War Museum, isn't it called
1:33.3	falling wall. Can you describe that painting to me? It shows a narrow lane with
1:40.1	quite tall buildings on each side.
1:44.7	Halfway along into the picture,
1:47.9	the left side of the building is falling,
1:50.6	directly threatening the two firemen who are operating the hose.
1:56.0	The point about that is that it's something that you witnessed as a young man in the war as a fireman and as I understand it it might have been you under that
2:06.2	Oh very much so how did that come about? The leader of the team that said to me we're not
2:12.0	doing any good here you weren't putting the fire out it was a huge fire. Oh huge yes. So he said go back to the pump and he said bring out the chap there and we'll get him to stay here and I want you to come with me
	...

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