These drawings are from the estate of the artist’s son, made before the Second World War. Pay here.

Barnett Freedman is an artist well loved in his own right but is now known to be one of the band of students who was at the Royal College of Art at the same time as Eric Ravilious. As Ravilious’s fame rises more information on his friends comes to light.

Freedman was born into a poor Russian emigre Jewish family in the East-End of London at Stepney. As a child he was ill a great deal and thus had little formal education, other than the skills from playing music or drawing in bed (just like how Edward Bawden learnt to draw).

With a great skill for draftsmanship he got a job drawing up designs for a stonemason in 1916, but this job had little creativity in it, bit did provide him with funds to study at evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art. During his time there he got a job at an architects office, fleshing out designs for war memorials, and this sort him to study lettering.

Barnett took his evening classes until 1922, having tried for three years tried to get a scholarship to study art but got nowhere until he got an interview with Sir William Rothenstein at the Royal College of Art, who then pursued the local authority into awarding Freedman the scholarship based on the work he provided at the interview. Rothenstein clearly liked Barnett as he made a portrait of him in 1925.

At the RCA, Freedman became friendly with Bawden and Ravilious, as well as Percy Horton, Vivian Pitchforth, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He visited Bawden and Ravilious at Great Bardfield and is mentioned many times in Tirzah Garwood’s autobiography.

Freedman later taught life drawing classes at the RCA and at the Ruskin school in Oxford. He became a master of lithography and was commissioned to make many designs for dust jackets, that are now highly collectable.

These designs include drawings for Faber & Faber’s Ariel poems, and the first edition of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. He also has become famous as a poster designer for London Transport and Shell.

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Freedman married Claudia Guercio in secret and they didn’t announce their marriage to their families for several years.

His most seen works are the 1935 design for the King’s Stamp and his designs for Anchor threads.

Freedman worked as an official artist during the Second World War and after the war produced large lithographs for the Lyon’s teahouse series and the Artists International Association.

He died in 1958 and a retrospective arranged by the Arts Council was held at Tate Millbank. In 2020 Pallant House Gallery held a major retrospective of his work.

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27cm x 38cm with pin marks from where Freedman attached it to the board.

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