Henry Tonks, FRCS (9 April 1862 – 8 January 1937) was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher.
Tonks cared nothing for other authorities and he disliked self-satisfied young men ... His surgical eye raked my immature designs. With hooded stare and sardonic mouth, he hung in the air above me, like a tall question mark, moreover ... of a derisive, rather than an inquisitive order. In cold discouraging tones he welcomed me to the Slade. It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, was likely to derive much benefit.[6]
From 1910 until his death, he lived at 1, The Vale, Chelsea, where he also had his studio.[7]
Tonks resumed his medical career in 1914, first at a prisoner of war camp in Dorchester, and then at Hill Hall in Essex. He made pastel drawings of Auguste Rodin and his wife, who were refugees. He served as a medical orderly at a British Red Cross hospital near the Marne in France in 1915, and joined an ambulance unit in Italy. He became a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916, and worked for Harold Gillies producing pastel drawings recording facial injury cases at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot and the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup[8][9] – a contribution recognised in the exhibitions Faces of Battle at the National Army Museum in 2008 and Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery at the Strang Print Room of University College London in 2002. There is also information on him at Will Self's "Kafka's Wound".[10]
Tonks became an official war artist in 1918, and he accompanied John Singer Sargent on tours of the Western Front. In August 1918, they both witnessed a field of wounded men near Le Bac du Sud, Doullens, which became the basis for Sargent's vast canvas, Gassed.[11] Tonks went to Archangel in Russia in 1919 as a war artist with a British expeditionary force.[12]
He succeeded Frederick Brown as Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930, although he initially turned down the appointment in favour of Walter Sickert, only taking it up when Sickert declined the position. Further post-war students included Thomas Monnington, William Coldstream, Helen Lessore and Philip Evergood. Lessore, who founded the Beaux Arts Gallery with her husband Frederick Lessore in 1923, described him as "a towering, dominating figure, about 6ft. 4in. tall, lean and ascetic looking, with large ears, hooded eyes, a nose dropping vertically from the bridge like an eagle's beak and quivering camel-like mouth".[13]
He retired in 1930, and declined the offer of a knighthood. An exhibition of his work was held in London at the Tate Gallery in 1936, only the second retrospective at the Tate for a living British artist. He died at his home in Chelsea.
'^Paul Gough (2009) A Terrible Beauty': British Artists in the First World War (Sansom and Company) pp.198–199.
^Merion Harries; Susie Harries (1983). The War Artists, British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century. Michael Joseph, The Imperial War Museum & the Tate Gallery. ISBN0-7181-2314-X.
^Lynda Morris, 'Tonks, Henry (1862–1937)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 9 April 2013
E. Chambers, 'Fragmented Identities: Reading Subjectivity in Henry Tonks' Surgical Portraits,' Art History, 32,3 (2009), 578–607.
David Boyd Haycock, "A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War" (2009)
J. Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (1939)
L. Morris (ed.), Henry Tonks and the 'art of pure drawing' (1985)
New English Art Club, One hundred and fiftieth annual open exhibition, featuring a selection of work by Professor Henry Tonks ... from the Royal College of Surgeons and the Imperial War Museum (1997)
J. Rothenstein, 'Henry Tonks 1862–1937', in J. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters Sickert To Smith (1952)
Tate Gallery, Exhibition of Works by Professor Henry Tonks [exhibition catalogue] (1936), 7p.
