The artist Bernard Dunstan, who has died aged 97, was an admirer of Pierre Bonnard’s dictum that: “The thing must start with a vision, with a moment of excitement. After that, you study the model.” His own luminous paintings, so evocative of the intimisme of Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, combined an impression of spontaneity with a rigorous technique founded on direct observation and meticulous drawings. Among his best works were pictures of orchestras, derived from extensive sittings during rehearsals.
As well as creating subtle, tender images of the human figure, Dunstan was a dedicated teacher and author of systematic guides to painting. His publications, in Studio Vista’s Pocket How to Do It series, range from Composing Your Paintings (1971) to books on genres such as portraiture and still life (1966 and 1969 respectively). They offer a detailed analysis of the formal aspects of art, together with practical tips that range from the cleaning of brushes to the importance of financial correspondence with patrons. He also produced, in 1976, a book on Painting Methods of the Impressionists, a group of artists who, like him, were less spontaneous in practice than in appearance.
Dunstan clearly saw himself as part of the mainstream of western art, and all his books switched confidently from analysis of old masters to examples of his own work. His edition of Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing, published in 1991, includes his pastels of cloud studies, which demonstrate Ruskin’s doctrines as effectively as any of the more celebrated pictures that they accompany. The book is not only a lucid version of Ruskin’s text but also shows how important close observation of his subjects was to Dunstan himself.
Much of the charm of his compositions, especially the nudes, comes from their accidental quality. While Dunstan did sometimes construct pictures in his studio using a hired model, he seemed happiest to “come across” a motif or pose. This often happened when he left his home in Kew, south west London, to travel with his wife, the artist Diana Armfield, or to stay in their cottage in Wales. Scenes of Nude Waking (1988) or Diana sitting in contemplation on her bed (Winter Morning: Nude, 1990) have an informality that makes them come alive, even though, as Dunstan put it, “there is a lot of geometry hidden away under the casual appearance”.
Dunstan was not primarily a landscape painter, unlike his wife, but he did become something of a specialist in the scenery and people of Venice. He gave this most popular of themes a personal inflection, reflecting the circumstances in which he worked. One example, On the Riva (1990), succinctly captures a specific historical moment: the first year in which eastern European tourists could visit La Serenissima in numbers. Carefully managing their budgets, the visitors picnic informally on the Riva degli Schiavoni (the Slavs’ waterfront, one of the city’s main streets). Such images exemplify the career of a man who did not seek to redefine art but produced a distinctive response to the traditions of western painting, rooted in his particular experiences and perceptions.
Born in Teddington, south-west London, Bernard was the son of Albert Dunstan, a successful petrochemical engineer with BP, and his wife Louisa (nee Cleaverley). He attended Colet Court school, where art instruction consisted of copper-plate writing, and St Paul’s boys’ school, west London, before being rejected by the RAF at the beginning of the second world war on account of his eyesight.
As the camouflage department was somewhat oversubscribed, in 1939 he began his artistic training at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Soon afterwards he entered the Slade School of Fine Art, which had been evacuated from London to Oxford, and after the war he taught art until 1949 at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. It was at the end of this period, in 1949, that he married Diana, whom he had met a few years earlier at the Slade.
The post in Bristol was followed in the 1950s by appointments as a lecturer at Camberwell School of Art in London, his alma mater, Byam Shaw, and Ravensbourne Art College, also in London, while he weathered the avant garde storm of the 60s with a job at City & Guilds of London Art School. In these institutions he promoted a method of figurative painting that shared something of its step-by-step approach with the “basic design” espoused by abstract artists, however different the results were.
For all his apparent obliviousness to fashion, Dunstan remained reasonably successful, exhibiting regularly with Roland, Browse and Delbanco in London from 1952 to 1970, and then with other galleries, including Agnew’s. He showed annually in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and eventually became the longest serving Royal Academician thanks to his election in 1968. He also served as president of the Royal West of England Academy in the early 80s.
Crucially, Dunstan was a member of the New English Art Club, the society that had been founded in the 1880s in opposition to the RA, as a bastion of new-fangled impressionism. As Dunstan himself said, by the time he joined the Art Club in 1947, it was already middle-aged, but it provided a link with Walter Sickert and other historic figures on whom he drew heavily. At his death some of the warmest tributes have come from NEAC members, who found him a source of instruction and inspiration as an exponent of the “poetry of paint”.
He is survived by Diana, two sons, Andrew and David, and two grandsons, Mark and Wade; another son, Robert, died in 2007.
• Bernard Dunstan, painter, born 19 January 1920; died 20 August 2017
