Biography
Francis Butterfield (b. Bradford, Yorkshire, UK 1905 - d. 1968) left school to become a wool stapler (dealer of wool). He studied painting at Bradford School of Art under Henry Butler. Encouraged by leading educator and art collector of the day, Sir Michael Sadler (1861-1943), in the late 1920s he sacrificed a regular income, to make a career by painting full-time and developed his distinctive abstract style. In 1934 he had his first successful show at the Zwemmer Gallery, London. In that year he also joined the Seven and Five Society, whose other new members included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash. He opened studios in both London and Paris yet by the early 1940s Butterfield had given up painting and was working as an illustrator / journalist with Norman Kark Publications.
