Every Picture Tells a Story
Every Picture Tells a Story
by Elizabeth Talbot
In 1957, the Royal Academy of Arts in London honoured the artist Sir Gerald Kelly (1879 - 1972) with a retrospective exhibition, only the fourth member of the RA to have experienced this during their own lifetime after Sir Frank Brangwyn, Augustus John and Sir Alfred Munnings.
Gerald Kelly (whose grandfather was the founder of the famous Kelly's Dictionaries) was the only son of Frederic Festus Kelly, an Irish priest who became vicar of St Giles, Camberwell, where the young Kelly grew up and frequented the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge and later studied art in Paris where he met many of the Impressionists including Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir, with Rodin being a particular mentor. He became a portrait painter and kept a studio at the family home in Camberwell. Kelly travelled through Spain, America, South Africa, and Burma, the latter inspiring a series of paintings of Burmese dancers. In 1920 he married Lilian Ryan, who became his model for a series of portraits. Other sitters included T.S. Eliot, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Somerset Maugham. He became a favourite painter of the Royal Family which led him to paint both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and spend much of WW2 at Windsor Castle.
In 1944 Kelly was appointed by the Royal Academy as its representative on the Dulwich College Picture Gallery committee (as the Dulwich Picture Gallery was then known). Kelly was knighted in 1945 and in the same year was made Surveyor of the Dulwich Collection. In 1949 he was elected President of the Royal Academy, and it was during his tenure that he introduced the idea of retrospective exhibitions of living artists. As a modest man, he himself took quite a lot of persuading to be acknowledged in the same way, but when his own exhibition took place, 291 wonderful works were on display, lent by 67 owners including royalty, galleries, museums, private collectors, and Kelly himself.
