Collection: Peter Oliver 1927 - 2006

Introduction by Peter's daughter Jaquine Oliver

"I am very proud of my ‘painter/father’, Peter Oliver. 

Showing at The Redfern Gallery in his early 30s while teaching his beloved students at the Manchester High School of Art were feats in themselves – his golden era.

However, the father I remember most was the painter in his studio locked away every evening till midnight with Beethoven’s Pastorale blaring out or sitting on a French beach filling sketchbook after sketchbook.

Now 60, I have a new perspective on his life and am fascinated by what shaped his painting passion/obsession. 

Born 1927 into a Jersey doctors’ family, the second eldest of four he had a happy start… age 13, he was escaping the German invasion on the last plane out, becoming a refugee schoolboy in Derbyshire while his father was deported to Germany. 

Two years later he contracts TB and spends his next 5 teenage years convalescing. In his Midhurst sanitorium he is mentored by Adrian Hill and spends hours, months and years drawing and painting his way into recovery. To quote Adrian Hill “the art germ was firmly planted in the mind and heart…” This is the foundation of his stoic art ethic which steered him through the rest of his life. 

There was a studio in all my childhood houses and every summer holiday in France the sketchbooks were loaded into the car with the camping gear, and we returned with them ‘full’.

“We always end up by the sea among boats and on beaches. I collect information for painting and return with mental indigestion” He wrote in 1958. Now living by the sea, I am constantly and happily reminded of my Oliver childhood, and I look after a small collection of his beautiful work."