HOME      ABOUT US      CONTACT / FIND US      NEWS      MORE GALLERY

-------------- Artists------------ Alan Lambirth Bernard McDongah Bruno Brenan Clifford Fishwick F Donald Blake Dora Holzhandler Duffy Ayers Frank Hill George de Goya Georges Picard Honour Sterndale Bennett John Ambrose John Bolam John Carter John Martin Juliusz Krajewski Mary Stork Michael d' Aguilar Michael Fell Michael Quirke Michael Scott Michael Strang Peter Gardner Robert Hunter Vincent Milne William Barribal William Henry Innes William Mason

WILLIAM BARRIBAL

He was born of Spanish origins through an ancestor being cast ashore from a wrecked galleon off the coast of Cornwall. This probably explained Barribal’s love of colour, demonstrated during his childhood days in Worcester, when he was given his first box of paints. Rejecting the duller pigments, he carried emerald green and vermilion in his pocket long before he ever thought of using them. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a local lithographic draughtsman, though he rebelled vigorously when realising he was only required to transfer other people’s designs to stone. Subsequently, he was then allowed to experiment with his own techniques. During this time he also attended evening classes at the local art school.

Barribal then went to Paris for a year to study at Julien’s and Carlo Rossis’s, with an allowance of a pound a week. Here his main influences were Jules Chêret and Alphonse Mucha. On his return to London, he sold a couple of theatre posters before joining a firm of designers and colour printers in Belfast. However, this sojourn soon came to an end and he returned to London armed with sketches he had intended to sell to ‘contacts’. He then accepted an offer of employment from a studio in Gower Street, enabling him to undertake a variety of work, including a design for the ‘Daily Graphic’, winning him the Burgoyne Poster Competition - resulting in his first appearance in the press. From this time he worked as a freelance; many picture dealers began buying his work, including Louis Meyer, art editor of ‘London Opinion’. It was at this moment that he met an art student, a girl he had known during his formative days in Worcester. They married and she became the ‘Barribal Girl’. She was his only model and inspiration, appearing on picture postcards, almanacs, calendars and pages of leading weeklies.

This work resulted in Barribal’s exclusive contracts to produce posters, proving to be a very versatile artist in terms of subject and technique. At the same time, these posters provided the stepping-stone to his third and final artistic phase; that of portrait painter. His first commission was of ‘Captain Bruce Bairnsfather’, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy. From this time onwards he experimented with different methods, styles and media, his work taking on a transparent brilliance, vivacity and colour.