Leonard Rosoman

Leonard Rosoman (27 October 1913 – 21 February 2012) was a British artist.

Early life Rosoman was born in London and educated at the Deacon's school, Peterborough, and then at the King Edward VII school of art in Newcastle upon Tyne, under E.M.O'R. Dickey in 1930–4, at the Royal Academy Schools in 1935–6 and at the Central School under Bernard Meninsky in 1937–8.

His first major break came in 1937, with a commission to illustrate My Friend Mr Leakey, a children's book by the scientist JBS Haldane. From 1938 he ran life classes at the Reinmann school, the London branch of a Berlin art college. shows the incident on the night of 29/30 December 1940 in which a young fireman who had just relieved Rosoman at his position was killed by a collapsing building in the City of London. Whilst the other fireman, the author William Sansom, survived, the scene haunted Rosoman and he re-worked the painting several times. Rosoman sometimes called his work, The Falling Wall. It was completed in August 1941. The painting was shown in the Firemen Artists exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1941.

In 1943 Rosoman was seconded to the War Office to illustrate books on fire-fighting, and in April 1945 was appointed, by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, to a full-time salaried position, along with James Morris, to document the activities of the British Pacific Fleet. Commissioned as a captain in the Royal Marines, he was posted to the Far East. He joined the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable in Sydney in May 1945 and sailed with her for three months before returning to Sydney to work his on-board sketches into finished paintings. On board Formidable he became fascinated by the new technologies he encountered there, "I've become interested in all sorts of strange devices like radar indicators, pom-poms and planes with wings that fold up like a moth's". He painted a mural at the restaurant in the Academy's home, Burlington House, depicting scenes of life within and around the building.

A retrospective exhibition of Rosoman's war art was held at the Imperial War Museum in 1989, before being shown in Edinburgh in 1990. . Rossoman received the OBE in 1981. He was married twice.