Old Postillion

Francis Dodd (1874-1949), portrait painter, landscape artist and printmaker, was born in Holyhead in Wales, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art alongside his better-known contemporary, also represented in Te Papa's collection, Muirhead Bone, who married Dodd's sister. At Glasgow, Dodd won the Haldane Scholarship in 1893 and then travelled around France, Italy and later Spain. He returned to England in 1895 and settled in Manchester, becoming friends with the leading modern architet Charles Holden before moving to Blackheath in London in 1904.

During World War I in 1916, he was appointed an official war artist by Charles Masterman, the head of the War Propaganda Bureau. Serving on the Western Front, he produced more than 30 portraits of senior military figures, many of which are in Te Papa's collection in the form of postcards. However, he also earned a considerable peacetime reputation for the quality of his watercolours and portrait commissions. He was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1929, a position he held for six years, and was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927 and a full Member in 1935. From 1911 Dodd lived at Arundel House in Blackheath, South London, until he took his own life in 1949

This drypoint is a fine character study of a proud, dignified, elderly man, immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit, and with an old-fashioned fob-watch chain. 'Old-fashioned' is the operative word: in 1920, when the print was made, postillions were a dying race, even if some of them, like this man, had survived the proverbial strikes of lightning!  A postillion rides the leading nearside (left-hand side) horse of a team or pair drawing a coach or carriage, especially when there is no coachman.

See: Wikipedia, 'Francis Dodd', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Dodd_(artist)

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    April 2018