Leslie Cole

Leslie James Cole (11 August 1910 – 1976) was a British artist and teacher. He served as a war artist from 1942 to 1946 during which time he recorded events in several theatres of war and also the aftermath of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Early life Cole was born in Swindon in 1910 and studied lithography and murals at Swindon Art School between 1927 and 1932 before attending Birmingham College of Art for a year. In 1934 he enrolled at the Royal College of Art, where he obtained a diploma in mural decoration, fabric painting and lithography in 1937. He exhibited with the lithography group, the Senefelder Club in 1934 and in 1937 he began teaching at Hull College of Art.

Second World War When the Second World War broke out, Cole joined the RAF but was discharged on medical grounds. Cole continued teaching and attempted to obtain work as a war artist from Sir Kenneth Clark and the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC), but was refused at first. In order to impress Clark, Cole took a leave of absence from teaching at Hull to accompany a trawler assigned to coastal minesweeper work and also to sail aboard a destroyer on Gibraltar convoy duties.

In 1943 Cole was awarded his first full-time WAAC commission and went on to become one of the Committee's most productive artists. In May 1943, after many delays, he went to Malta where he observed the end of the German siege of the island. As well as depicting the impact of the siege on the civilian population, Cole took part in Operation Corkscrew, the Allied action to recover the island of Pantelleria. Cole returned to Hull in November 1943 and taught there until July 1944 when he was given his second WAAC commission. He went to France and spent time with the Royal Marines in Normandy before moving to Cairo in December 1944 and then onto Greece the next month. In Greece, he painted several scenes of violence and destruction as the ELAS resistance movement fought other factions after the German withdrawal.

From May 1945, Cole was attached to the South East Asia Command and was sent to Singapore and then Burma, which he reached in May 1945. Cole went on jungle patrols with a unit of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and met Burmese guerrilla fighters. Before returning to Britain, Cole also visited Borneo, where he was attached to a Gurkha regiment, and then Java.

Legacy In 1985 the Imperial War Museum created an exhibition of Cole's War artist work, entitled To the Front Line. Two of his later paintings appeared on Antiques Roadshow in 2009 when their value was estimated at 6,000 pounds each by paintings expert Rupert Maas.

In 2025 an exhibition in his home town was held by Museum & Art Swindon titled Leslie Cole: Recording Conflict. This combined works from the museum's own collection by Cole and his contemporaries together with loans from the Imperial War Museum.