Description
Charles Mahoney was a key figure of a golden generation of artists who attended the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s. Amongst his (better known) contemporaries were Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Henry Moore, Enid Marx, and Barnett Freedman. In the Twenty First century interest in these artists has grown apace and museum exhibitions, especially evolving around Ravilious and Bawden, and publications have proliferated. When in 1928 Ravilious, Bawden and Mahoney were commissioned by Lord Duveen to paint murals for Morley college, (Lambeth, London), Mahoney was given, (literally) the centre stage. Had the celebrated mural cycle survived (it was destroyed in WW2), Mahoney might today be better known. Mahoney went on to do remarkable mural cycles at Brockley School, (Hilly Fields, London) in the early 1930s, and Campion Hall, (Oxford), in the early 1940s (after Stanley Spencer was taken off the job for suggesting that he could model the Virgin on one of his mistresses). Mahoney’s painting, The Garden (16, 250), was also selected as one of the ‘Sixty paintings for 51’, the landmark Festival of Britain paintings exhibition. The exhibition’s oldest contributor was L.S. Lowry, and the youngest, Lucien Freud. Today Mahoney is mostly remembered as a teacher, serving from 1928 to 1953 at the Royal College of Art, from 1954 to 1963 at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, and from 1961 until his death in 1968, at the Royal Academy Schools.
