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Painter of landscapes and figures, known socially and sometimes as a painter just as Herbert Truman, born in Devon, where he was brought up in Dawlish. Studied at South London School of Art and St Martin’s School of Art. By 1912, the year he first exhibited at the RA, Truman was in Cairo, where he started an art school and a trades school. The Egyptian government engaged him to help the Secret Service to suppress drug trafficking and two years later Truman joined the Egyptian Intelligence Office, becoming head of the political section of the Cairo Criminal Investigation Department and a friend of T E Lawrence. Later transferred to the British General Staff and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. By the mid-1920s Truman was in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1946 settling in Clifton, Bristol, where he soon joined the Savages, three years later being elected an honorary member of RWA.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


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