Harold Speed was an English painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 in oil

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

 and watercolour

Watercolor painting

Watercolor or watercolour , also aquarelle from French, is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle...

 of portraits, figures and historical subjects.

Born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, the son of Edward Speed, an architect, he studied architecture at the Royal College of Art

Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...

, but soon took up painting, and continued his studies at the Royal Academy Schools between 1891 and 1896, winning a gold medal and a travelling scholarship in 1893. In 1896, he was elected as a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters

Royal Society of Portrait Painters

The Royal Society of Portrait Painters is a British association of portrait painters which holds an annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London...

.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1893, and held his first one-man exhibition in 1907 at the Leicester Galleries. In 1930 he provided paintings for the new chapel of Wesley House

Wesley House

Wesley House is a Methodist theological college on Jesus Lane in Cambridge, England. It was founded in 1921 as a base for training Methodist ministers within the precincts of the University of Cambridge...

, Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

.

Speed lived in Watlington, Oxfordshire

Watlington, Oxfordshire

Watlington is a market town and civil parish about south of Thame in Oxfordshire. The parish includes the hamlets of Christmas Common and Greenfield, both of which are in the Chiltern Hills. The M40 motorway is from Watlington.-History:...

 and London, where he died on 20 March 1957.

There are editions of his manual "The practice and science of drawing" (1913) in the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

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External links