Frank Spenlove-Spenlove

John Francis Spenlove-Spenlove (24 February 1864 – 20 April 1933) was a Scottish landscape and figure painter.

Life and work

Spenlove-Spenlove was born in Stirling, Scotland.

In 1896, he founded a successful school of modern art at Beckenham, Kent, called the Yellow Door School of Art. One of his outstanding students was Ba Nyan, a penurious student from Burma who had been sent to England in 1921 to study at the Royal College of Art but soon switched to Spenlove's Yellow Door School where he could focus on oil painting. Spenlove and Ba Nyan developed a close relationship and Spenlove eventually deferred Ba Nyan's fees. When Ba Nyan returned permanently to Burma in 1930, he had a revolutionary impact on Burmese painting, introducing the techniques in Western painting which he had learned from Spenlove and other British painters such Frank Brangwyn.

All of Spenlove-Spenlove's paintings show his peculiar skill in the rendering of an atmosphere. Among the best known are:

Funeral in Holland in Winter (gold medal, The Salon, Paris, 1901) Too Late (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) The Little White Cross (Manchester Art Gallery) In the Shadow of the Church (Manchester Art Gallery) Vespers, Holland (1906, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow) Grey of the Morn (Guildhall, London) Grey of Evening (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull) The Hill-Top (1912) He died in London in 1933, aged 69.