Lawrence Irving 1897 - 1988

Laurence Henry Forster Irving, RSMA (1897-1988) was a well-known artist, book illustrator, author, art director and set designer, grandson of the famous 19th century actor Henry Irving. He was born in London and served with distinction in the Royal Naval Air Service during World War I. He studied art at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London W8 and at the Royal Academy Schools and produced landscape and marine paintings. Irving then became more and more involved with the theatre and the film industry and by the late 1920s he worked with Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood on the classic film ‘The Iron Mask’ (1929). In all he worked on more than fifty major film and stage production designs over the next forty years. As a painter he worked mainly in oils, he had a number of solo exhibitions with The Fine Art Society (FAS), London from the 1920s, where he showed by far the largest body of his work. The relationship with the FAS lasted for more than thirty years. He also had a solo show at Agnew’s in Bond Street in the mid-1950s. Irving exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1921-35, at the Glasgow Institute in 1924 (3 works), and with the Royal Society of Marine Artists of which group he was a member. He lived in Whitstable, Kent from the early 1920s, then in Rotherfield Greys in Oxfordshire and later at Wittersham near Ashford in Kent, where he died. @copyright Grant Waters