Note: Frederick James Lloyd was an English artist who became famous for his studies of animals and country landscapes. Lloyd was the first living self-taught artist to have a painting hung at the Tate in London, titled 'Cat and Mouse'.
Lloyd took up painting full-time at the age of forty-eight, having worked at a variety of occupations including cowman, labourer, bus conductor, factory worker and policeman. With great intensity, he worked in watercolour and gouache, seated at the kitchen table, surrounded by the chaos of family life with eight children.
Lloyd’s artistic “discovery” took place in 1957, when the influential critics – Herbert Read and John Berger - paid a visit to this unknown artist’s council house in Yorkshire. (Read, who lived locally, had responded to an invitation from Lloyd’s wife.) The following year saw his first exhibition at London’s Arthur Jeffress Gallery, with catalogue introduction by Read. When this gallery closed in 1961, he moved to the Portal Gallery, where he became the pre-eminent name in its stable of artists. The Portal soon offered him a monthly stipend, allowing him to give up his job at a plastics factory and to work full-time as an artist.
A countryman to the core, raised in Cheshire, with an adult life spent in Yorkshire, rural scenes inevitably dominated his output. An affectionate and quirky portrayal of animals took precedence, and where humans are included in his compositions they are usually involved in rural or agricultural activity – hedging, wattling, harvesting and the like.
Lloyd achieved minor celebrity status in 1963, through Ken Russell’s BBC documentary 'The Dotty World of James Lloyd'. Two years later, in an inspired piece of casting, Russell gave the totally untried Lloyd the starring role of Henri Rousseau in Always on a Sunday, his biopic about the 19th century French naïve painter.
