Original poster design from the 1940s.
BIRD, Henry (1909-2000). Sadler’s Wells Opera [original poster design]. Circa 1940. Signed

An original poster design in crayon, watercolour and gouache, image size 27 x 40cm, faintly squared-up in pencil, signed “H. Bird” to the lower margin, also in pencil, recently reframed (newly exposing the artist’s signature) in a deep limed oak frame (frame size circa 48 x 61cm) with cream mount; in very good, bright and fresh condition, with frame in equally good state, with an old paper label to the reverse wrongly attributing the work to “Benjamin Gibbon, born 1914 and designer at Sadlers Wells in the 1930/40s. A landscape and mural painter who studied at The Slade. Ex: Michael Crawley, January 1986”.

The English painter, draughtsman, and theatre designer Henry Arthur Richard Bird (1909-2000) began life in a Northampton slum but demonstrated an early talent for drawing, eventually winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he studied as an exact contemporary of Barnett Freedman, whose work this design closely resembles. Other contemporaries there included Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, and Enid Marx, artists who made up an extraordinary cohort, described by their tutor there, Paul Nash, as “an outbreak of talent”.  In London, Bird distinguished himself by winning painting and portrait prizes, the Continuation Scholarship and the college’s most prestigious award, the Travelling Scholarship. 

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In 1936 he took up his first teaching post as a lecturer at the University College in Wales, Aberystwyth.  Later in his career Bird became head scene painter at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells as well as resident designer at the Embassy Theatre. Returning to his home city he took up a post at Northampton School of Art, where one of his drawing pupils was the architect Will Alsop (who won the Stirling Prize in the year 2000 with his design for Peckham Library). In 1983 he was acknowledged with a Civil List pension for his services to art. His obituary in The Stage described him as “one of Britain’s most distinguished and versatile artists” while The Times commented that he “was one of the comparatively few artists to be thoroughly comfortable with the grand scale of ambitious public painting projects”.

Aside for his work on set design is known for his ambitious public murals such as the theatrical murals on the safety curtains at the Ashcroft Theatre and the Royal Theatre Northampton as well as church works like those at St. Margaret’s Church, Denton and All Saints’ Church in Earls Barton.

Exhibitions include: Associate of the Royal College of Art; Society of Mural Painters; Tate Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum; Lambeth Palace. Subject of a TV documentary by Anglia Television in 1981.