Arthur Royce Bradbury

Mother and Child (Framed Early 20th Century Figurative Portrait Painting)

1927

Arthur Royce Bradbury was born on September 17, 1892, in Preston, Lancashire. He specialized in painting portraits, landscapes and marine scapes in oil, watercolor and pastel. Bradbury was also an accomplished etcher and teacher at the Pembroke Lodge School and Wimborne Grammar School. He studied at the St. John’s Wood School of Art before being accepted at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1913, Bradbury was recorded as living at Bournemouth, then Parkstone, Dorset in 1915 before finally settling in Poole for many years. He served as a cadet in Mercantile Marine serving for them on the West African trade route, before taking up art. It was then that he made several voyages on the barquentine ‘Waterwitch’ carrying coal and china clay from Cornish ports. The ‘Waterwitch’ was the last trading square-rigger in British service at that time. Bradbury became an Associate of the Royal West of England Academy and exhibited there and widely elsewhere, mostly portraits. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913 a work titled Iris and went on to exhibit fourteen works there. Examples of his work may be seen at the Liverpool and Brighton Public Art Galleries.