Julian Trevelyan

Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988)

Julian Trevelyan was a painter and engraver born in 1910 in Dorking, Surrey.

Trevelyan studied art under S.W Hayter in Paris from 1930 to 1934 and travelled widely in Europe, later settling in Hammersmith, London in 1935. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1937 and was a member of the English Surrealist Group and the London Group, later teaching at the Chelsea School of Art and the RCA.

As one of the first participants of Mass Observation, which to this day depicts everyday life in Britain, Trevelyan spent a month in Bolton’s industrial streets, painting and creating collages from his suitcase full of materials. During this time he became interested in ‘Sunday painters’ and championed the self-taught group of Ashington Miners, known today as the ‘Pitmen Painters’.

A keen traveller, Trevelyan’s adventures took him abroad to North Africa with the Industrial Camouflage Unit and to the Mediterranean with his second wife, the celebrated painter Mary Fedden. From 1956 he was Head of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art where he shared his love of the process with students including David Hockney, R.B Kitaj and Norman Ackroyd. His home and workplace for over 30 years was at the Durham Wharf studios on the banks of the River Thames at Hammersmith, now under development by Turner Prize winning architecture studio Assemble.