Roderic Barrett

Roderic Barrett (8 January 1920 – 2000) was a British artist born in Colchester, England, known for his paintings and engravings. After the war, he returned to Colchester. In 1947, Barrett began teaching part-time at the Central School in London.

Barrett advocated for what he described as “authentic” art. He had strong moral views, and he valued work and honesty.

Family Barrett's great-grandfather was a nonconformist radical and Chartist. His grandfather was a Liberal and Congregationalist. His father was a Congregationalist, then a Quaker, a propagandist for the Labour Party, and pacifist, who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the First World War. When Barrett was ten, his mother died, contributing to his later melancholic disposition. He had three children: Jonathan, Kristin, and Mark.

Legacy In the words of his biographer David Buckman: Barrett was one of the most distinctive artists working in Britain in the twentieth century ... he is the opposite of the commercial painter of pretty pictures that fill a gap in the sitting room wall and convey their message in a glance Or as his friend Thomas Puttfarken wrote: ‘[Barrett was] fundamentally resistant to, and suspicious of, the “isms” of modern and post-modern art since the 1960s, Roderic pursued his own way. In the same friend and art historian's view: when Barrett switched from engravings to oils, he retained the mastery and precision of drawing associated with the former. In Barrett's work, seemingly normal objects, such as chairs, tables, buckets and candles take on symbolic meanings, suggestions of myths, the subconscious, or of nightmares. What shines through the appearance of a domestic scene are the fears and anxieties, the slender hopes and the melancholia of the human condition