Judith, 1956

James Fitton RA (1899 - 1982)

RA Collection: Art

The artist’s daughter Judith, a musician, is shown playing Bach on the flute. Both she and Fitton’s son, Tim, feature in many of his paintings along with his wife Margaret, also an artist and illustrator. Judith and Tim had very itinerant childhoods due to moving during WW2.

A study of Judith in a similar pose features in the background of Fitton’s painting ‘The Painter’s Wife’ (1958; RA 102), as one of the sketches and reproductions pinned to the striped wallpaper above the fireplace of the family sitting room. In this study Judith is, however, depicted with her father who stands turning the pages of her sheet music.

James Fitton (1899-1982) was born in Oldham, Lancashire, his father was a mill worker and influential trade union organiser and his mother a weaver. Fitton left school in 1913 and from 1915-1921 worked for a Manchester textile merchants company. From 1914-1921 he attended evening classes at Manchester School of Art, where he met Lowry with whom he became lifelong friends. In 1921 Fitton moved to London and for eighteenth months was a studio assistant to Johnson Riddell Printers. In 1925 he began attending evening classes in lithography at the Central School and in the late 1920s became acquainted with artists associated with the Slade and Royal College of Art. In 1928 he married the painter and illustrator Margaret (Peggy) Cook, who was also a student at the Central School.

In 1930 Fitton became a member of the New English Art Club, the London Group, and the Senefelder Club. From the mid-1930s he was a member of the Artists' International Association. He was appointed art director of Vernons agency, with whom he worked for over fifty years. A prolific illustrator and printmaker, Fitton contributed illustrations and cartoons to many newspapers and journals ranging from The Left Review, to Lilliput and Housewife. He also designed posters for London Transport, the Ministry of Food and Ealing Studios, most notably for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and contributed designs to the seaside section of the Festival of Britain.

Fitton’s paintings typically depicted contemporary life with a quirky realism often verging onto a gentle caricature. His painted café and pub interiors, cycling nuns, art critics, street markets, butchers, fishmongers alongside more intimate domestic scenes of his wife and children at their Dulwich home. With the exception of a one-man exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons in 1933, Fitton mainly exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy, where he first showed in 1929. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944 and a Royal Academician in 1954. His wife wrote of his entry to the Royal Academy as an A.R.A.

‘This had an enormous effect on his life. He could now paint as he wanted and have a certain window in which to show anything he chose. However, it was by no means just this that enriched his life for although he was an individualist, he was also gregarious, loved the friends he made, and the dinners with the wonderful speeches that they had in those days and to which he contributed often.’ (Margaret Fitton, ‘James Fitton R.A. Drawings’, Arts Club Newsletter, April 1983, p. 4)