Benedict Rubbra

Benedict Rubbra artist

Benedict Rubbra's father was the composer Edmund Rubbra and his mother, Antoinette, was a violinist. Their home, where Benedict was born in 1938, was a flint cottage that lay in a secluded valley in the Chiltern Hills. He began to draw the surroundings of his home and then during the summer of 1949 he travelled with his mother on a seminal visit to Florence. The impact of seeing the paintings of Fra Angelico and Masaccio and the work of Donatello and Brunelleschi was the source of his search for an answer to the mystery of their ability to achieve with timeless poetry a perfect balance between control and freedom.

Benedict went school at Christ’s Hospital where Nell Todd taught art and immediately he had a friend and teacher who helped and inspired him through his school days. He then gained a place at the Slade School of Fine Art and received his diploma in 1960. Tessa and Benedict married in 1964 and soon after moved to the home where he had been brought up. They kept a few sheep and chickens and a donkey on the hillside behind the cottage. In the garden they planted fruit trees and grew vegetables and shared this setting with their two young children.

Benedict began a career as a portraitist in 1970 when a ten-year period of teaching in art schools came to an end. This gave him the freedom to experiment, and in order to show all aspects of his work he built a studio and gallery as an annex to the cottage. Exhibitions of new work were organized every two years until 2001 when he moved with Tessa to start a new life in Devon.

​The core of his work for the last forty years has centered on developing the process of making three-dimensional structures based on ideas principally drawn from the landscape and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. These structures are destined to become the point of departure for paintings and drawings.

http://www.benedictrubbra.co.uk