Author & Artists of Britain

Featured article

Rupert Bear and his creators

The children of Britain have been lucky enough to enjoy the adventures of three famous fictional bears - Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington Bear, and Rupert. Rupert came first and still continues to this day, in his original format as a newspaper cartoon strip.

Read full article

Aubrey Beardsley - known for his disturbing but beautiful black ink drawings

There has probably never been an artist quite like Aubrey Beardsley. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasised the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic.

Read full article
Heath Robinson - the art of the contraption

William Heath Robinson was a visual artist known for the humorous drawings that resulted from his fertile and inventive imagination. His name entered the language as early as 1912, and is still deployed today, when 'Heath Robinson' is used to describe the kind of outrageous contraptions that featured in many of his illustrations and cartoons.

Read full article
Harold Pinter - complex Nobel-winning dramatist

Harold Pinter was a Nobel-winning British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, most prominent from the 1960's to the 1980's. During his 50-year career he was recognised as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. The term 'Pinteresque' is now used to describe a cryptically mysterious situation imbued with hidden menace.

Read full article
William Morris, influential artist, poet and thinker

William Morris is perhaps most associated these days with his wallpaper and textile designs, which are still very popular. However, he was a revolutionary force in Victorian Britain and became a major figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement.

Read full article
Beatrix Potter - writer, illustrator and founder of the Lake District National Park

Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, farmer and conservationist; she was best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as "The Tale of Peter Rabbit".

Read full article
Charles Pears - seaside and marine poster artist and illustrator

Charles Pears was a British painter, illustrator and artist, born in Pontefract, Yorkshire in 1873, whose work was widely used to promote British destinations and events, including the art competitions at the 1928 and 1932 Summer Olympics. He is currently the subject of an exhibition at Pontefract Museum.

Read full article
Rena Gardiner - capturing historic places in a distinctive style

Rena Gardiner was an artist and printmaker, best remembered for her guidebooks to historic places, buildings and the countryside which she wrote, illustrated and printed in her cottage in Dorset.

Read full article
Edward Bawden - influential mid-century designer and illustrator

Edward Bawden was a 20th-century English painter, illustrator and graphic artist, known for his prolific output of distinctive prints, book covers, illustrations, and posters. He was particularly known for his linocut prints - often illustrating London scenes.

Read full article
Charles Dickens - prolific Victorian writer

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic, whose works enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the 19th century. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters - such as Ebenezer Scrooge, Mr Pickwick and Fagin - and is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era. To date, over 400 big-and small-screen adaptations have been made from his novels, as well as numerous stage productions.

Read full article
Paul Nash - surrealist landscape war artist

Paul Nash was a British painter, printmaker, illustrator, and photographer who achieved recognition for the war landscapes he painted during both world wars. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century.

Read full article
William De Morgan - distinctive ceramicist of the Arts and Crafts movement

William Frend De Morgan was an English pottery maker and tile designer whose work is seen as a significant element of the arts and crafts movement. A lifelong friend of William Morris, he designed tiles, stained glass and furniture for Morris & Co. from 1863 to 1872, and was also a popular novelist.

Read full article
'George Eliot' - Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans

Mary Ann Evans, writing under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a highly acclaimed Victorian novelist, famed for writing 'Middlemarch' and 'The Mill on the Floss'. But it wasn’t just her written works and her assumed identity that brought her fame; she also courted controversy in her personal life.

Read full article
L.S.Lowry - the painter who chronicled industrial Lancashire

Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist of the mid-twentieth century whose drawings and paintings depict Pendlebury, Lancashire. Here he lived and worked for more than 40 years, painting workers heading to the factories and mills.

Read full article
Charles Keeping, artistic master of the macabre

Charles Keeping (1924 – 1988) was an English illustrator, children's book author and lithographer from London. He was particularly known for monotone illustrations of myths and poems, in a misty and often blood-soaked style that is very distinctive.

Read full article
Ravilious and the Downs

Eric Ravilious was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in East Sussex, and is particularly known for his distinctive watercolours of the South Downs and other English landscapes.

Read full article
Douglas Adams - Mostly Harmless

Douglas Adams was an English author and humourist, best known for the BBC radio comedy series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which first aired in 1978, and introduced listeners to the awful possibility that any advanced galactic civilisation would be just as absurd and incompetent as late twentieth century Britain.

Read full article
Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson was an English writer and printer. Writing in the mid 1700s, he is regarded as one of the most important innovators of the novel form.

Read full article
Hammond Innes

Born in 1913, Ralph Hammond Innes was a British novelist who wrote over 30 novels - usually thrillers or adventure stories with interesting and often exotic settings.

Read full article