Anthony Gross

Anthony Imre Alexander Gross (19 March 1905 – 8 September 1984) was a British printmaker, painter, war artist and film director of Hungarian-Jewish, Italian, and Anglo-Irish descent.

Early life and work Anthony Gross was born in 1905, at Dulwich, London, the son of the Hungarian cartographer and founder of Geographia Ltd, Alexander Gross (1880–1958), and suffragette Isabelle Crowley (1886–1938). His sister was the artist, writer and publisher Phyllis Pearsall. He attended Shrewsbury House School and later Repton School until 1922, and from the following year studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks. Later studies were at the Central School of Art and Crafts, London, the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Academia de San Fernando, Madrid. In 1925 he studied within life classes and as an engraver at Académie Julian and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris.

Returning to Britain in 1934, Gross worked on animated films, illustrated a 1929 edition of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles and became an art director for London Films. In 1937 he returned to work in Paris. Gross had married Villeneuve fashion artist Marcelle Marguerite Florenty in 1930; their children were Mary (b. 1935) and Jean-Pierre (b. 1937). In 1940 he brought his family from France to England, to live at Flamstead, Hertfordshire.

Gross accompanied the D-Day invasion of Northern France, wading ashore near Arromanches at 2pm on D-Day. He sketched the beachhead landings and spent the night in a slit trench on the beach before moving inland the next day. Gross recorded the devastation of Bayeux and Caen, and followed the Allied armies to Paris and then into Germany. He witnessed the meeting of American and Russian forces at the River Elbe on 25 April 1945. From 1948 to 1954 he was a life drawing tutor at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, afterwards becoming Head of Printing at the Slade School of Fine Art. Leeds Museums & Galleries, Scarborough Art Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum and the Tate Gallery, London, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; the National Gallery of Norway, Oslo; the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec; the Cabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Louvre and the Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA.

His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.