Robert Back
Seaman, sailor and marine artist
The Independent, Monday, 12 July 2004
Robert Back was one of the most distinguished British marine painters of his time, noted for his depiction of the great days of sail.
Robert Trenaman Back, painter: born Adelaide, South Australia 4 October 1922; married 1958 Denise Edwards (two daughters); died Seaford, East Sussex 14 February 2004
Robert Back was one of the most distinguished British marine painters of his time, noted for his depiction of the great days of sail.
His collectors appreciated his ability to capture the drama of an historical scene as if witnessed by its contemporaries. Back abhorred the sterile approach of many modern marine paintings which purport to depict the past, "but the general effect is brash, the sails too white and transparent".
As with other branches of specialist painting, marine artists know that they are usually painting for connoisseurs, alert to spot the smallest fault. Back realised this. "Good reference is most important," he wrote. "A painter must see the bones that give a particular ship of the past its recognisable character." The great Dutch and British marine masters of the past were the standard against which he measured himself.
So often in marine painting the ship depicted is technically accurate but exists in a vacuum. Back's ships inhabit a real time and place. In such pictures as his Georgetown Harbour with Aqueduct Bridge and University 1894 the viewer immediately feels that he is there, participating in a scene that lacks only animation and sound track. He exhibited with the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Society of Marine Artists, David Messum and Omell galleries and his paintings appeared as limited-edition prints. He later exhibited with the dealer Donald Henderson in London and Washington.
Back was a seaman and sailor all his life, as well as a painter. His addiction to being afloat came from both his father's and mother's families. In 1833 his ancestor Captain George Back sailed in search of the Northwest Passage; the adventures of his expedition in the ice-fields are a part of the history of British exploration and earned him a knighthood. Back's maternal great-grandfather was first mate on the Torrens, the wool clipper that held the record of a 64-day passage from London to Adelaide, Australia. His mother's father was one of the first captains of the Lamport and Holt lines, and his mother grew up at the captain's table. Two cousins were admirals in the First World War.
Robert Back was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1922, where his father, William Edward Back, and his mother, née Dorothy Treneman, a singer and gold medallist at the Guildhall School of Music, were then living. His father had moved from England to Australia after the First World War, taking a job as an engineer. He had wanted to be painter, but the family refused and he became an aircraft designer. For Robert, he was "my influence in art". An exceptional artistic talent earned William a Bond Street exhibition at the age of 18 and a friendship with Sir Alfred Munnings, President of the Royal Academy.
Robert was the youngest of four children who revelled in "the outdoor life, the space, the freedom and the friendship of a small outback community". The only time he wore shoes was on a trip into Adelaide, 10 miles away:
There were no toys. Father dammed the gully running through our garden, building a 15-foot-high wall to make a 20-foot-deep swimming pool. We made fleets of square-rig sailing ships and sailed them across the pool into harbours dug out from the clay banks. We even set fire to them like a funeral pyre, and we had our own battles on the water.
When Back's father inherited the family estate in Norfolk, in 1931, the family made a hazardous 1,300-mile trip to Sydney in their ancient car to leave for England. Their ship was the Jervis Bay, of Second World War fame, and excitements of the voyage included a black P&O vessel with brown boot topping belching smoke as she sliced her way through the calm of the Red Sea; the magic of the Suez Canal; the first sight of England and the four-funnelled Winchester Castle, in her lavender grey and red and black funnels, steaming off to South Africa.
In 1933, Back gained a place at St George's Chapel, Windsor - "a cloistered life, Marlborough suits, big starched Eton collars, and every day two services and a choir practice". Norfolk Broads holidays were spent on the 14ft clinker-built Ursula that his father had sailed as a boy:
He just pushed us off the jetty, saying: "You will learn." I lived through every Arthur Ransome book - Swallows and Amazons, Winter Holiday, Coote Club and Peter Duck.
Back then went to Felsted public school, which had a new art building bequeathed by the Courtauld Institute. He won the school art prize three years running, and Lord Courtauld bought a dockland watercolour of his for five shillings. The school ran a seamen's mission at the Royal Docks in London, and Back would sketch there during school holidays. The docks were packed with liners with accompanying tugs and lighters and Thames sailing barges tacking upriver. "All this, and my sea trip from Australia, fired the inspiration to be a marine artist."
Back's dockland sketches were published when he won the Royal Drawing Society's Gold Medal at the age of 15. The following year he gained a four-year Andrew Grant Scholarship to the Edinburgh College of Art. He was taught still-life, life composition and portraiture, painted in oil. "I soon learned to hide my watercolours and never mention marine art, because it was considered unimportant to great art."
After a year's studies, in 1940 Back volunteered for the Royal Navy, serving as a gunner until 1946. There was no chance of becoming an Official War Artist and when he did practise his art it was not appreciated. In 1942, sketching a ship anchored in the Clyde from the Bay Hotel, he was frog-marched out by plain-clothes police and charged with the same offence as possessing a camera. He "got a rocket" from his destroyer captain and when his sketchbook was returned, each drawing had been stamped and passed by HM Censor.
His ship, the 1917 destroyer HMS Venomous, designed for 90 men but with a crew of 140, was deployed for the bitterly cold Arctic convoys to Murmansk. It was only on the third trip that Back managed to get two hooks for his hammock. The forward mess deck was constantly awash and during one enemy air attack every gun on the ship had frozen.
In August 1942, Back's was one of 14 handpicked ships to take part in the relief of Malta. The attacks on the convoy seemed endless. Only three of the 14 arrived, two others, including the crucial tanker Ohio, being towed in three days later, which enabled Malta to survive another six months until the pressure was off. Back's later war service was spent in a Captain-class frigate, based in Belfast, hunting U-boats.
Returning to civilian life, Back completed his studies at Edinburgh, in 1949 gaining his diploma in drawing and painting. His teachers included the notable artists John Maxwell, Leonard Rosoman and William Gillies. After a year "tramping the streets of London with a portfolio trying to get advertising work", he took a job at Portora Royal School at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. He had a fine testimonial from Gillies, whose criticism he had sought while on wartime leave.
Since boyhood, Back had longed to race on water. A family friend bought him one of the first National dinghies, designed by Uffa Fox, which he called Shrimp. During the war years there was no racing, so Back and his father stripped Shrimp to minimum weight and while in the Navy Robert studied racing manuals. In the first year after the war, Shrimp had an unbeaten record on the Broads. He was asked to helm all sorts of class racing boats. In 1950, he was elected Olympic trialist for the Helsinki Games. In 1965 he crewed in the Admiral's Cup and Fastnet Race in Bob Watson's 15-ton Cervantes.
By then, Back had experienced life in the Merchant Navy. After teaching in Northern Ireland for a year, followed by a short but successful period selling Dexion industrial shelving and a time as sales manager on a turkey farm, he was suddenly at the wheel of a 29,000-ton liner sailing out of the Solent for South Africa. "I had never helmed any ship that size in my life, but nobody knew." After two trips to the Cape in the Edinburgh Castle, he moved over to the Royal Mail ship Alcantara, but, after five years in the Merchant Navy and having got married, he went back to teaching art and to painting marine scenes.
He converted the loft of a cottage in Seaford, Sussex, into a studio. By chance, he met the artist Frank Wootton, like Robert's own father a protégé of Alfred Munnings. Wootton introduced him to Malcolm Henderson, who had a gallery in London. Suddenly his marine paintings started to gain recognition and to go up in value. When Henderson moved to America, Back's market moved with him. In 1983, he had his first major American exhibition at the Atlantic Gallery in Washington, others following.
He was included in standard books, such as Denys Brook-Hart's Twentieth Century British Marine Painting (1981) and the Dictionary of Sea Painters (1980), by E.H.H. Archibald, Curator of Paintings at the National Maritime Museum. Campbell College in Belfast, the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, US Merchant Marine Academy, New York, and US Constitution Museum, Boston, are among public collections holding his work.
Back was a likeable mix of the eccentric, unconventional and conservative, described by one friend a "a Rolls-Royce with no petrol". Finding it cheaper to charter than to own, he continued to sail into old age:
I have a fine geriatric crew and have taught them all to sail. My retired bank manager cooks for me and looks after the money, my church organist offers up a hymn and a prayer and my solicitor looks after the legal side should we ever get bumped.
David Buckman
ACCLAIMED ARTIST DIES AGED 81.Eastbourne Herald, March 3, 2004
A MARINE artist from Seaford has died at the age of 81 after a wonderful life which took him around the world with the Royal Navy, plus a career which gave him transatlantic acclaim.
Robert Back's face will be familiar to many Seafordians, who benefited from his teaching at either the former prep school, St Peters School, or at Seaford Head Adult Education Centre.
Robert (pictured) spent more than 40 happy years in Seaford but his life began in Adelaide, South Australia, where he experienced what he described as a 'Huckleberry Finn style' childhood in the small outback community.
At the age of nine he and his family returned to Britain, and the eight-week sea journey gave him his first taste of the sea.
The Back family had a rich naval tradition including an ancestor who was knighted for his exploration with the Royal Navy, a great-grandfather who set the record for 64-day passage from London to Adelaide, and two cousins who served as admirals in the First World War.
It was little surprise that Robert became a great sailor.
He said of his journey from Australia, 'This thrilling voyage became the influence on my life as a painter ? the romance of the sea.'
After several years living on the Norfolk Broads, during which time his father taught him how to sail, his painting talent was recognised. He was awarded a scholarship to the Edinburgh College of Art in 1939.
But after a year at the college he joined the Royal Navy and served in three major Second World War naval missions: the Arctic convoys to Murmansk, the relief of Malta, and the hunt for U-boats in the North Atlantic.
After the war he completed his studies and was optimistic about forging a career in naval art.
In 1950 he was chosen to compete for a trial for the 1952 Olympic games in Helsinki, and in the 1960s he took part in both the Admiral's Cup and the Fastnet Race.
After a spell at the helm of a 29,000 ton commercial liner, travelling to South Africa, Brazil and Argentina, he returned to Edinburgh where he met his future wife Denise.
The pair soon married and settled in an 18th century cottage in Steyne Road.
Robert then became Art Master at St Peter's School and converted the loft of the cottage into a studio where he painted during the evening.
After a few years his second career began to take off, and he began to win recognition in the specialist market of marine art.
Critics agreed that he painted in a very romantic style which brought the ships to life, but his attention to detail, and experience as a sailor meant they were crafted with painstaking detail and authenticity.
He earnt a great deal of respect on both sides of the Atlantic. During the 1980s he showcased much of his work at the Atlantic Gallery in Washington DC.
Other highlights of his career included an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Society of Marine Artists.
Robert was also the proud father of daughters Clare and Alison.
The Gazette spoke to Clare at her parents' home in Steyne Road.
She said, 'My parents have lived in Seaford for 46 years. They met in Edinburgh in 1957 when my mother was working as a speech therapist.
'I think it was love at first sight and it was a love that lasted forever.
'This house was his favourite place, he spent hours painting in the attic and he loved the garden.
'He was always inviting people over to see the garden and he had very green fingers.
'In fact he was a very able and talented man, he could turn his hand to anything.
'He was very eccentric but at the same time quite conservative. You would often see him to wear one of his trademark blue 'po' hats, but you would never see him without a tie.
'I think he'll be much missed, not just by his family but everyone he used to see walking around the town wearing one of his hats.'
Robert Back died from Leukaemia on February 14, and his funeral took place yesterday at Eastbourne Crematorium.
* If you are interested in the paintings we have featured, you may be interested to know the family has a number of limited edition prints for sale.