James Noble

British 1919 – 1989

James Noble was born in Middlesex in 1919. He went to work in the family’s painting and decorating business but soon found that he had an aptitude for drawing and was encouraged to attend evening classes.

Noble studied at both the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and the Regent Street Polytechnic. He had as his master the well-known Scottish landscape painter and engraver Iain MacNab (1890-1970) who himself had been a pupil of the fashionable Glasgow School of Art and Heatherleys, the oldest independent art school in London (founded in 1845, which focused on figurative painting) and eventually became its Principle.

Noble soon found himself drawn to the flower paintings of the great 17th Century Dutch romantic artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Roelandt Savery and Jan Brueghel the Elder. It is in this genre that Noble found his own forté.

There was a break in his career when he served as an assault engineer in the infantry during World War II; however he managed to continue his drawing throughout.

He favoured a somewhat simplistic approach to his compositions (and often stylised) but always with a clear sense of balance and colour.

Since his first solo London exhibition at the Bond Street Gallery in 1957 his work has been sort after by collectors far a-field and as he was a prolific artist his work appears regularly in the art market and is always keenly contested.

The artist died in 1989 in Norwich.