Leonard Henry Rosoman

Leonard Henry Rosoman, born 27 October 1913; died 21 February 2012.

Leonard Rosoman was a painter, muralist, printmaker, a teacher and a war artist. But it was as an illustrator that he found his true calling. 

Rosoman was born in London and educated at the Deacon's school and King Edward VII school of art in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Royal Academy schools and the Central School of Art in London. 

His break came in 1937, with a commission to illustrate a children's book called My Friend Mr Leakey, written by the scientist JBS Haldane. From 1938 he ran the life classes at a private art academy called the Reinmann school, the London branch of a Berlin art college.

In 1939 he returned from an extended stay in Honfleur, north-west France, just in time for the outbreak of the second world war. Commissioned into the Auxiliary Fire Service, he began painting subjects from his daily life. On one occasion, a wall collapsed, narrowly missing him but killing two colleagues. The highly graphic rendering of this incident made his name, and attracted the attention of Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery and chairman of the war artists' advisory committee, who invited Rosoman to join his elite band of official war artists. - Guardian