20th Century Traditional English Pastel Summer Evening by the Thames

Artist/ School: Norman A. Olley (British, 20th century, 1908-1996), 1993, signed to the front and inscribed verso

Title – “Summer Evening by the Thames near Hampton Middlesex”, a colourful busy scene of people enjoying boating and fishing on the river near London.

Medium: pastel on thick layered card, unframed. A sheet of protective paper is attached to the upper edge, which we will leave in place to protect it until it is with its new owner for framing.

Measures: Painting : 15.5 x 10.5 inches

Provenance: all the paintings we have by this artist have come from a private UK collection of this artists work.

Condition: The painting is in overall very good and sound condition. We have measured to exclude the unpainted edges.

Artist: Norman Arthur Olley was born in 1908 to a British Army family stationed in Lucknow, Bengal India. His mother died there in 1911, and his father in 1936.
Norman married in Gravesend Kent in 1937, and at the beginning of the war in 1939 he was an aircraft sheet metal worker.
He and his wife to Surrey in the late 1940’s -early 1950’s where he was a long term member of the Thames Valley Arts Club and where he regularly exhibited his work. In 1951 his painting “View from Richmond Park” was held in high regard at a very well attended exhibition in Esher, Surrey.
The East Molesey area was one of his favourite areas to paint, a 1953 Art Club report showed he had completed what was thought to be the only painting of the old cricket pavilion there and included the figure of a famous local dog “Pat” who had retrieved over five hundred cricket balls from the Thames.
In October 1954 he exhibited alongside work by Terence Cuneo who lived very close by to Norman. Norman was “well known in artistic circles” and a prolific painter of traditional English pastoral scenes with figures, and often with a dog in the scene.
He passed away in Chatham, Kent in the summer of 1996, after returning to the county by 1961.