David Inshaw

We are delighted to represent David Inshaw, one of the great English painters living today.

David Inshaw is acclaimed for his resonant paintings of the English countryside, alive with light effects, trees, birds in flight, bonfires and figures not posing but caught up in their own inner lives. He has charted his life through poetic pictures that speak urgently to all of us who experience emotions and dramas. Now that he is in his 80s he is focused on touch points in the West Country landscape such as Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and the Devil’s Den as well as churchyards and fireworks that haunt his memory and his dreams. As the loss of memory beckons, he is painting as strongly and poignantly as ever in works that are both intensely personal and universal in their potency.

David Inshaw’s paintings can be viewed via the links below. REMEMBER, an exhibition of his most recent work, is showing at Sladers Yard 23 March – 12 May 2024. Links to all his available work will be found further down this page.

Please contact us on gallery@sladersyard.co.uk or phone 01308 459511 to enquire about a painting, drawing, print or Giclée print.

REMEMBER

A great pastoral painter and visionary, that rare kind of artist who appears perhaps once or twice in a generation and illumines the world in a new way – for those who are prepared to look. William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer are among his progenitors. Inshaw paints the landscape and the figure with imaginative intensity, and his pictures are rich with personal memories and associations.

ANDREW LAMBIRTH GUARDIAN

His landscapes are haunted. You tap into their strangeness on a sensual level: you can feel it in the mood, in the poise, in the light. It pervades the atmosphere as surely as the smell of dew pervades the dawn. The profoundly familiar is made, at the same time, so alien, so otherworldly. Inshaw belongs to a great tradition of English Romantics: he awakens our perceptions to the possibilities of a miracle. No wonder the first time I saw him he had his head in the clouds.

RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON ART CRITIC, THE TIMES (from her foreword to David Inshaw’s 2013 Sladers Yard solo show catalogue).

Another England How David Inshaw changed the Landscape of Art GUARDIAN, October 2015

AVAILABLE PAINTINGS

PRINTS: ETCHINGS

DRAWINGS

GICLÉE PRINTS

David Inshaw grew up in Biggin Hill, close to Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham. He studied at Beckenham School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, with a six month scholarship to study in Paris, before he started to teach painting and printmaking at the West of England College of Art in Bristol. In 1975, with Peter Blake and five others, he formed the Brotherhood of Ruralists, who devoted themselves to painting subjects drawn from nature and English mythology and literature. Inshaw came to prominence in that period and has exhibited widely and painted his mysterious captivating paintings ever since.

One of his most famous paintings, The Badminton Game, was acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1980. Inshaw was represented by Waddingtons in London until 1998. Since then he has been exhibited at Agnews, the Fine Art Society and most recently the Redfern Gallery. His work has been included in numerous major Arts Council touring exhibitions and museum shows throughout his career. In 2019, Looking Back, Looking Forward a major retrospective of his paintings was held at the London Art Fair in the Saatchi Gallery, London.

He has featured in a number of television films including Arena in 1984 and Hidden Paintings in 2011. His work is in many public, private and corporate collections worldwide including His work is in the Arts Council Collection, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the British Council, the British Museum, The Government Art Collection, The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, Tyne and Wear Museums, Tate and the Wiltshire Museum as well as many of the finest private art collections in this country and overseas. He lives in Devizes.

David Inshaw has seen West Bay and its environs as a place of inspiration since the seventies. His two famous Cricket Ground paintings are set at Little Bredy, just up the road. In 2007 he showed an extraordinary collection of major West Bay paintings in the then very new Sladers Yard Gallery. Since then he has shown in group shows here with two more solo shows of his paintings in 2013 and 2020. In 2021 we filled the gallery with his etchings, aquatints and drawings. His work is always available through Sladers Yard including works to commission.

Never and Always

A fully illustrated 40pp print catalogue of the exhibition

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Pyrotechnics

A fully illustrated 48pp catalogue from David Inshaw's 2013 Sladers Yard solo show

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Bonjour Mr Inshaw

58pp perfect bound paperback book. Poems by Peter Robinson. Paintings by David Inshaw. Published by Two Rivers Press. £15.99 + p&p.

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For Inshaw the past is alive in the present, and he paints both the history of the landscape and the spirit of the place, imbuing his paintings with a kind of accumulated intensity arising from an unusual mixture of the serene and disquieting. The land has witnessed tragedy as well as romance and joy, and Inshaw’s pictures allude to this complexity. His work encapsulates the beauty of occasion, of day-to-day existence heightened by a sense of the mythic potential of ordinary life.

ANDREW LAMBIRTH from the foreword for David Inshaw’s catalogue MOMENTS OF VISION (Sladers Yard)

I am thrilled to have this wonderful work. It resonates with me in its summation of eternal thoughts and dreams. It is a beautiful painting, a poem in oil. In charting his own life experiences through his extraordinary talent David has succeeded in connecting with the lives and thoughts of others who share his passions and interests, and who have watched enthralled as he taken us on the journey of his life. I hope he has many more works to come.

From one of David’s collectors on receiving his painting.