“William Townsend occupies a particular role within twentieth century British art owing to his ability to try out, work through and assimilate what he needed from fast changing ideas and issues that animated painting before during and after the second world war. He was observer, practitioner, and commentator, a multiple role that gives him a special place in any record of the period.”
Frances Spalding

William Townsend was born in Wandsworth, London on the 23 February 1909, the son of William Lewis Townsend, a poetry-writing dentist. Both his parents were appalled by the carnage of the First World War and became pacifists and Quakers. One of his brothers, Peter Townsend, became a leading Sinologist, and an inspirational editor of Studio International, for which William Townsend wrote on Canadian Art.

William Townsend is known as a significant landscape painter.  His work encompasses Italy, France, Egypt and Tunisia, but he is best known for his English and Canadian landscape paintings, as well as his contribution to art education in both these countries. Townsend entered the Slade School of Fine Art as a student in 1926 under the professorship of Henry Tonks, and completed his studies in 1930. He was awarded the Orpen Bursary and won the newly awarded Wilson Steer landscape prize for At Bashford which is in the UCL Art Museum collection.

He held his first solo show at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London in 1932. In 1935 he contributed to the Anti-Fascist Solidarity Exhibition in Soho Square, London, alongside artists such as Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Eric Gill and Henry Moore. He became more involved in anti fascist, protests and politics declining an invitation by the Labour party to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Canterbury. With the start of the Second World War he enlisted as an officer in the Royal Artillery, before transferring to the Army Education corps. He married Mary Baxter in 1942, and his daughter Charlotte was born in 1945, his son Richard in 1951.

When Sir William Coldstream became the Slade Professor in 1949, William Townsend was appointed as a lecturer at the Slade. He moved to Kent, retaining a small flat in Bloomsbury. The landscape of the Weald of Kent was to occupy his painting in England for the rest of his life.

In 1962 he was invited to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies and started painting the Canadian landscape. He was later appointed as a visiting professor, then head of painting at the Banff School.

In 1968 he was appointed an individual chair as professor at the Slade with responsibility to develop a postgraduate Fine Art course, which continues in the form of the MFA and MA in Fine Art at the Slade to this day.

William Townsend died on the 4th of July 1973 in Banff, Alberta, Canada aged 64.

The Tate Gallery held a retrospective of his work in 1976, and published extracts from his journals edited by Andrew Forge as: The Townsend Journals: an artist’s record of his times. The Tate Gallery holds several of his paintings in its collection.

Thanks to the generosity of William Townsend’s family, the Slade is able to continue to represent the legacy of an artist and educator who made a major contribution to Fine Art in England and Canada through the William Townsend Memorial Lectures.

Dryden Goodwin, Reader in Fine Art Media and Head of Print, Chair of the William Townsend Memorial Committee

List of Speakers

2021	Zineb Sedira	Standing Here Wondering Which Way To Go
2018	Tacita Dean
2016	William Kentridge	Enough + More Than Enough
2014	Phyllida Barlow	Phyllida Barlow
2012	Stan Douglas	Stan Douglas
2010	John Hilliard	Studio as Site, Set and Subject
2008	Derek Boshier	From Doris to the Cocaine Cowboy
2005	Cornelia Parker	One Day this Glass will Break
2003	Rachel Whiteread	Major Projects and Other Works
2002	Lawrence Weiner	Aesthetics, Ethics, Etc
1999	Norman Bryson	Seurat and the Scene of Drawing
1997	Michael Craig Martin	Post-Painting Painting and Other Thoughts
1996	Bridget Riley	Painting Now Text reproduced in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 139, No. 1134 (Sep., 1997), 616-622.
1995	Bruce McLean	Out of my Head – Out of my Mind
1994	Peter Greenaway	The Stairs (transcript available via UCL Special Collections)
1994	Antony Gormley	Raising Heavy Matters
1992	Thomas Crow	Art Historian and Contemporary Art
1991	Richard Hamilton	The Hard Copy Problem
1990	Richard Deacon	Ambiguous Gestures
1989	Susan Hiller	Reflections
1988	Declan McGonagle	Art: The Issue of Place
1988	Anthony Hill	A Short Space from Time Text reproduced in Art Monthly, no. 123 (Feb. 1989), 3-5.
1986	Bernard Cohen	Making Art & Killing Culture
1985	Richard Cork	Bomberg and the Bomb Store Text reproduced in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 1000 (Jul. 1986), 493-505.
1984	Andrew Causey	Classical and Romantic in the Art of Wydham Lewis
1983	Richard Rogers	The Crisis of Public Space and the Language of Architecture
1982	Anthony Caro	Space, Place and Sculpture
1981	Howard Hodgkin	How to be an Artist (read an edited transcript on Howard Hodgkin's website)
1980	Reg Butler	The Venus of Lespugne and other Naked Ladies Text reproduced in exhibition catalogue Reg Butler, Davies, John and Alan Bowness. Tate Gallery, 1983.
1979	Kenneth Martin	Chance and Order
1978	Andrew Forge	Transatlantic Reflections: Some Remarks on Art in England
1977	Richard Wollheim, FBA	Adrian Stokes: Critic, Painter, Poet
1976	Sir Leslie Martin	Aspects of Art and Architecture: 40 Years in Retrospect See “Notes on A Developing Architecture” Architectural Review, Vol. 164, no. 977 (Jul. 1978), 11-17.
1975	Norbert Lynton	Art and its Publics
1974	Robyn Denny	Art and the State, and the State of Art

All Townsend Lectures

• 

  Townsend Lecture 2021 - Zineb Sedira

  2021/12/08 18:00 – 19:30
  – Slade 150

• 

  Townsend Lecture - Tacita Dean

  2018/10/04 18:15 – 19:30
  – Townsend Lectures

• 

  Townsend Lecture 2016 - Willam Kentridge

  2016/10/19 18:00 – 19:30
  – Townsend Lectures

• 

  Townsend Lecture 2014: Phyllida Barlow

  2014/11/05 17:30 – 18:30
  – Townsend Lectures