Painter, relief and printmaker. Born at Southminster, Essex, he studied art at South-West Essex Technical College, St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Bassingthwaighte had a one-man show at the Leicester Galleries in 1957, then went on to show widely in London – a series of exhibitions at the Piccadilly Gallery, 1964–72 – as well as Oxford, Los Angeles, Venice and Stuttgart. “My work is about tenderness and humanity,” Bassingthwaighte wrote, but an element of the strange is strong in his nudes and figure studies. “There is a sense of isolation, of the wonder of life,” critic Terence Mullaly wrote about the 1968 show. Bassingthwaighte’s work is in many public collections, including the Arts Council, Victoria & Albert Museum and Chantrey Bequest.