Biography
John Chistopherson (b. Blackheath, London 1921 - d. 1996) waas an artist and collector who originally had a series of administrative jobs in the Civil Service before he gave up to take up painting full-time in 1959. He had studied art at evening classes at Chelsea School of Art from 1955 and had been collecting pictures and sculpture since the 1951 Festival of Britain. His influences were many: pictorial, literary and musical, especially the music of Debussy and Ravel. Encouraged by Jean Dubuffet, Victor Pasmore and Anthony Caro he began showing at mixed exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries, The Redfern Gallery and the Mercury Gallery. He had a one-man exhibition at the Hyde Park Gallery in 1961 and a string of solo shows followed at such galleries as ICA, Marjorie Parr and England & Co, which gave him a memorial exhibition in 1997. There were retrospectives at Woodlands Art Gallery, 1972 and 1995. Arts Council, and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge hold his work, which range from a private-image world of abstraction to haunting, unpeopled townscapes of deceptive simplicity. He was married to the art-school trained Anne Christopherson (1921–2013) who taught art at Blackheath Hish School (1951-62).