Painter, designer, lithographer and cartoonist, born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, father of the artist David Gentleman. He left school at 14 to work in the family drapery business, which he disliked. After World War I service in the Glasgow Yeomanry and Scottish Rifles, in which he was badly wounded, Gentleman returned to continue studies at Glasgow School of Art, where Maurice Greiffenhagen was principal and where he won a travelling scholarship to the continent. After periods painting, cartooning for the Glasgow papers and with his farmer brother in Canada in 1929 Gentleman moved to London for a year, married and began working in advertising at S H Benson, W S Crawford and Stuart Advertising Agencies and with Jack Beddington and Vernon Nye at Shell.
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From early in World War II he produced posters and exhibitions at the Ministry of Information with Misha Black and Milner Gray; until about 1943 he freelanced as a design and illustrator; after the war returning to Shell, from which he retired in 1952. By then he was a fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists. In 1945 Gentleman published Brae Farm, childhood experiences on the Clyde, illustrated with his lithographs. Continued to paint well into retirement, representational although rather formalised works, landscapes around Hertford (where he lived 1930–56), and Fordham, near Colchester, Essex (1956–66, where he died), being favourite subjects. Others were racetrack scenes and views of northern France, where he bicycled searching for places known in World War I. In 1964 Colchester Art Society, at The Minories, put on an exhibition of work by John Bensusan-Butt, Tom Gentleman and “drawings for books” by Society members. The Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, holds Gentleman’s early Scottish oil landscapes; he completed an English summer’s day canvas mural for the Kardomah Café, rue de Rivoli, Paris; School Prints produced his lithograph The Grey Horses; and two of his posters are illustrated in The Shell Poster Book, 1998.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
