Dennis William Dring (26 January 1904 – 29 September 1990) was a British portraitist.

Early life

Dring was born in Streatham, London and studied at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

between 1922 and 1925, where he won several prizes and scholarships. He taught drawing and painting at the Southampton School of Art until 1942. In the late 1920s Dring was commissioned by the architects Edwin Lutyens and Albert Edward Richardson to paint a number of murals.

World War Two

Group Captain AG Miller DFC, Order of Lenin (Art

At the start of the Second World War Dring completed several portrait commissions for the

War Artists' Advisory Committee The War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), was a British government agency established within the Ministry of Information at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and headed by Sir Kenneth Clark. Its aim was to compile a comprehensive artist ...

, WAAC. In early 1942 he resigned from Southampton School of Art to work on a full-time contract for the Committee, specialising in Admiralty portraits. He travelled extensively within Britain at this time, painting subjects in Portsmouth, Scotland and the

Western Approaches The Western Approaches is an approximately rectangular area of the Atlantic Ocean lying immediately to the west of Ireland and parts of Great Britain. Its north and south boundaries are defined by the corresponding extremities of Britain. The c ...

. In the late summer of 1943 he was given a second full-time contract which included more general subjects. His final war-time contract with WAAC saw Dring working on portraits for the

Air Ministry The Air Ministry was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom with the responsibility of managing the affairs of the Royal Air Force, that existed from 1918 to 1964. It was under the political authority of the Secretary of State ...

throughout 1944 and 1945. Sixty-four of Drings war-time portraits, mostly pastels are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, who also hold five oil paintings by him. There are a further forty of his wartime works at the

National Maritime Museum The National Maritime Museum (NMM) is a maritime museum in Greenwich, London. It is part of Royal Museums Greenwich, a network of museums in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Like other publicly funded national museums in the Unite ...

, mostly pastel portraits.

Later life

Drings' post-war career included notable portraits of

Sir Frank Stenton Sir Frank Merry Stenton, FBA (17 May 1880 – 15 September 1967) was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, and president of the Royal Historical Society (1937–1945). The son of Henry Stenton of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, he was educ ...

, Austin Hopkinson and of

Cecil Hurst Sir Cecil James Barrington Hurst, Order of St Michael and St George, GCMG, Order of the Bath, KCB, Queen's Counsel, QC (28 October 1870 – 27 March 1963) was a British international lawyer. He worked from 1929 to 1945 as a judge to the Permanent ...

, family groups and landscapes plus portraits of members of the Royal Family. He recorded the presentation of the freedom of the City of London to the future Queen Elizabeth in 1947 and produced a series of five portraits for Lincoln's Inn that included pictures of both

Lord Hailsham Viscount Hailsham, of Hailsham in the County of Sussex, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1929 for the lawyer and Conservative politician Douglas Hogg, 1st Baron Hailsham, who twice served as Lord High Chancello ...

and

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...

. Dring was a frequent exhibitor at the

Royal Watercolour Society The Royal Watercolour Society is a British institution of painters working in watercolours. The Society is a centre of excellence for water-based media on paper, which allows for a diverse and interesting range of approaches to the medium of wa ...

and at the Royal Academy. He became an associate member of the RA in 1944 and a full academician in 1955. His younger brother James was also an artist. Dring married the artist Grace Rothwell and the couple lived at Compton, near Winchester. Their daughter, Melissa Dring is a portrait painter and forensic artist.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dring, William 1904 births 1990 deaths 20th-century English male artists 20th-century English painters Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art British war artists English male painters English watercolourists Painters from London People from Streatham Royal Academicians World War II artists