Painter, especially of the landscape of Essex, book illustrator, designer of wallpapers and textiles and enthusiastic gardener and plantsman. Born at Woolwich, Aldridge was a classical scholar at Oxford in the mid-1920s. Had drawn and painted since young, but never had any formal training. In 1933, the year of his first one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, he settled at Great Bardfield, Essex, where he lived until he died. He had first exhibited with the 7 & 5 Society in 1931 at the Leicester Galleries, invited by Ben Nicholson. He became associated with East Anglian painters such as John Nash, Cedric Morris and Edward Bawden, with whom he began designing wallpapers, as Bardfield Wallpapers, in 1938. In 1949 William Coldstream invited him to teach at the Slade School, where he remained until 1970.
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Elected an RA in 1964. An excellent portrait painter, John Aldridge’s portrait of his friend Robert Graves, the poet, is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Although he began to establish an international reputation by exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1934, his work was shown mainly in London, especially at the Leicester Galleries. An exhibition of Aldridge’s paintings, 1928–71, was held at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in 1971 and in 1975 a seventieth birthday retrospective at Miriam and Michael Webber’s Radlett Gallery, in Hertfordshire. There were survey exhibitions at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, which holds his work, 1999 and 2000. Abbott and Holder showed his wartime pictures in 2001. The Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Contemporary Art Society and many other public collections hold his work. A man of generous nature, Aldridge was a quintessentially English landscape painter, strong in design with often rich colours.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
