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Overview
Howard’s direct observation and brilliant lighting quickly struck a chord with the public, whose support never wavered across the artist’s long career. Such were his continual successes at the Summer Exhibition that Howard would observe "I’ve probably got more pictures on people’s walls than any other painter living today".
Ken Howard was one of Britain’s leading figurative and landscape painters. While he has been celebrated for his skilled studio nudes and scenes of London, he is best known for his brilliant and highly influential depictions of Venice, where he would spend large portions of the year drawing and painting in situ. Howard saw himself as ‘the last impressionist’, an epithet worthy of over seventy years spent capturing the effects of light in his canvases. A master at capturing the fall of light, the young artist departed from the fashionable mainstream stating that “for me, my main inspiration is light, and it is through light that I want to celebrate my world”.
Increasingly feeling, as he put it, “out of kilter” in the London art scene he applied for and won a British Council Scholarship to Florence in 1958, a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. For the next 70 years the light and landscapes of Italy would exert a continual pull on Howard, and his skill at capturing them would form the basis for his success. After completing his national service in 1955, during which time he honed his craft painting portraits of the officers’ wives, he would enrol in the Royal College of Art. At that time, the overwhelming vogue was for abstract expressionism, yet Kenneth always remained true to his unique style derived from en plein air art.
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