Rodney Gladwell was a British artist born in Didcot

Didcot

Didcot is a town and civil parish in Oxfordshire about south of Oxford. Until 1974 it was in Berkshire, but was transferred to Oxfordshire in that year, and from Wallingford Rural District to the district of South Oxfordshire...

, Berkshire, England whose paintings "hover between abstraction and figuration and play on this ambiguity".

Between 1949-1950 he followed in the foot steps of one of the greatest figurative

Figurative art

Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...

 painters of the 20th Century Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

 and studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi

Académie Colarossi

The Académie Colarossi is an art school founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. First located on the Île de la Cité, it moved in the 1870s to 10 rue de la Grande-Chaumière in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France....

. His work varied but a continual theme was his "heavily stylised female nudes". He exhibited in London and Paris with the Piccadilly Gallery, before being taken on by the gallery owner Lucy Wertheim

Lucy Wertheim

Lucy Carrington Wertheim was a British Gallery owner who founded the Twenties Group of "English artists in their twenties" in 1930 and was Christopher Wood's main patron before his death....

 and towards the end of his career the noted Swiss dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt.

In the 1960s he undertook several large commissions to paint extensive murals for Sussex University (where he was later given a retrospective exhibition) and the Georgian Club in London. His work is held by The Arts Council of Great Britain and University of Johannesburg

University of Johannesburg

The University of Johannesburg came into existence on 1 January 2005 as the result of a merger between the Technikon Witwatersrand and the Rand Afrikaans University . Prior to the merger, the Daveyton and Soweto campuses of the former Vista University had been incorporated into RAU...

.
In the 1970s his work fell out of favour and he disappeared from the art scene.