Valerie Thornton (1931–1991) was a British etcher and printmaker.

Biography

Thornton was born in London, but evacuated to Canada with her two brothers during World War II. She returned to London in 1944 and went on to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art in 1949. From 1950 to 1953 Thornton studied under P.F. Millard at the Regent Street Polytechnic, then spent eight months at Atelier 17 in Paris. In the early 1960s she moved to New York and worked at

Pratt Graphic Art Center The Pratt Graphic Art Center also called the Pratt Graphics Center was a print workshop and gallery in New York. The Center grew out of Margaret Lowengrund's Contemporaries Graphic Art Centre. In 1956 Fritz Eichenberg became the Center's director, ...

. In 1955, she succeeded

Howard Hodgkin Sir Gordon Howard Eliott Hodgkin (6 August 1932 – 9 March 2017) was a British Painting, painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with Abstract art, abstraction. Early life Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born on 6 August 1 ...

as assistant art teacher at

Charterhouse School (God having given, I gave) , established = , closed = , type = Public school Independent day and boarding school , religion = Church of England , president ...

and in 1965 she became a founding member of the Print Makers Council. In 1970 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painters-Etchers and Engravers. Thornton's work is included in a number of major public collections including the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

, the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, the

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

and others. Thornton died in 1991 in Chelsworth, Suffolk. Thornton was a member of The Regent Street Group - a group of nine artists who studied together at the Regent Street Polytechnic in the early 1950s. The group also included Susan Horsfield, Renate Meyer, Michael Lewis, Ken Symonds, Philip Le Bas and Peter Riches.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Thornton, Valerie 1931 births 1991 deaths 20th-century British painters 20th-century English women artists Alumni of the Byam Shaw School of Art Alumni of the University of Westminster Painters from London English women painters