Herbert Arnold Olivier

Herbert Arnold Olivier R.I., British artist, was born 9 September 1861 in Battle, East Sussex, England and died 2 March 1952 at Hayling Island, Hampshire, England. He was a London based portrait and landscape painter who studied at the Royal Academy Schools beginning in 1881, where he won the Creswick Prize in 1882. He exhibited extensively, including the RA starting in 1883, the R. P., the R. I. and the Paris Salon. He taught at the Bombay School of Art in the 1880s. He went to Kashmir with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught in 1884. In 1885 he showed 66 of the paintings from his trip to Kashmir at the Fine Art Society. These works were considered "effective, though hard and coarse in colour" by critics. He had a one man exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1908 and was appointed an Official War Artist in 1917. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887 and to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolors in 1929 where a major retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1935. He was an uncle of Sir Laurence Olivier, the actor. Much of this information comes from British Watercolour Artists up to 1920: Volume II M-Z, by Huon Mallalieu.

He is mentioned in Mallalieu's "British Watercolor Artists" and "Davenport's Art Reference". He may have been the H. A. Olivier whose work was reproduced in 20 color plates for "The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Historical and Descriptive", Cassell & Co. Ltd, London, 1908. His work and biography are published in "The Modern British Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture", Chamont, London 1964, the source for some of this information. In later life his work tended towards large ceremonial works using oils.