David Carr

British 1915 – 1968

The painter and collector, David Carr, was born in 1915 to a wealthy London family. Carr attended Uppingham School and left to join the family biscuit-making business, but left because he hated it and went to read history at Oxford University. On holiday in Italy he decided to become an artist against his father’s wishes, and studied briefly at Byam Shaw School in the late 1930s. For several years Carr attended Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing where his future wife, Barbara Gilligan was also a student. Carr bought Starston Hall in Harleston, Norfolk, and began to paint there. In London, Carr became a discerning collector and the friend of painters such as the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde and other Soho-based artists. He was prominent in the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society and was included by Bryan Robertson in a survey of British painting at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1953, and later in a show at Southampton City Art Gallery a few years later. Sadly, Carr died just before a show at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York, and it was in the 1987 Mayor Gallery show, that Carr’s true artistic stature was appreciated in London. Carr completed a remarkable series of oils in a post-Cubist style on the theme of man and the machine and a series of inventive late watercolours described by Robertson as “of special importance in British art of this period”. In 1997, his work was shown alongside that of his friend Prunella Clough at Austin / Desmond Fine Art.