The affectionate eye

Claude Rogers was an important figure for five decades, both as painter and as a teacher of art. With Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, he founded the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting in 1937, and later taught at Camberwell when the Euston Road painters regrouped after the war. Here, and later at the Slade, he had a considerable influence on the development of figurative painting in Britain. In his painting, Rogers pursued a rigorous realism based on visual fact. He enjoyed painting the 'unpaintable' - emergency hospital cases, burning stubble fields, landscapes rushing past beneath aeroplane wings.