Bernard Hailstone

Bernard Hailstone (1910–1987) was an English painter.

Hailstone belongs to the group of early 20th-century artists whose best-known work was done during the Second World War. After education at the Judd School, Tonbridge, Hailstone attended Goldsmith's college School of Art, under Clive Gardiner, then the Royal Academy Schools, with James Bateman and Walter Westley Russell.

At the beginning of the War, he felt the need to incorporate his artistic contribution to the war effort with more physical sacrifices. He therefore joined the Auxiliary Fire Services and witnessed at first hand the horrific destruction caused by bombing during the Blitz. He recorded some of these scenes in his paintings. In 1941 the War Artists Advisory Committee commissioned Hailstone to paint civil defence subjects. He supplemented these works with portraits of his colleagues in the fire services and other war workers. His portrait of W. M. Ladbrooke, Able Seaman, Merchant Navy (National Maritime Museum, London), painted following a visit to the Merchant Navy convalescent home in Limpsfield around 1943, embodies sympathy for the heroic yet vulnerable sailor.

Following his release from the fire services, Hailstone moved to Hull, where he continued to record the effects of the war from a civilian perspective. One such work is his ‘Big Ben the Bargee’, showing a bargeman and his wife and completed in June 1943 (National Maritime Museum, London). Throughout the rest of the war Hailstone travelled around the Mediterranean and North Africa, recording the activities of the mercantile navy in a similar, sympathetic vein. In 1944 he joined South-East Asia Command, painting Lord Louis Mountbatten and key members of his staff, pictures now in the Imperial War Museum, London. Thereafter he was probably most familiar from his successful practice as a portrait painter. A gregarious, outgoing man, Hailstone went on to paint Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Olivier, Paul Mellon - he worked a lot in America - and members of the Royal family, but he as happily painted ordinary members of the public.