ABOUT
William Edward Narraway, RP, RBA, NEAC, SPS (1 February 1915 – 21 October 1979) was an English portrait painter and sculptor, known for his portraits of the British Royal family, as well as senior church, military and academic figures.
​
Narraway was elected as a member of the New English Art Club (1964); the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (1966); the Royal Society of British Artists (1967); and the Society of Portrait Sculptors (1968) where he was elected to the council (1973) and served as their vice-president (1974-77).
Narraway was also elected as a member of the Chelsea Arts Club (1960), and of the Athenaeum Club (1977).
Early life
​
Narraway was born in London but his early years and education were in the West Riding of Yorkshire where he recalled sketching cricketers in his pre-school years. While he was awarded a place at an art school, family circumstances meant he could not take up the place and he moved to London in the mid-1930s to work, joining a commercial studio in the Strand where he met and formed a lifelong friendship with the artist Lewis Lupton. He recalled of this period “I was rather hungry for a while, I did everything, designing anything people would pay me for. It was stage scenery for a while, book illustrating and designing for advertising. In the evenings I would draw and paint from life in St Martin’s Art School.”​
​
Narraway, Lupton and other studio colleagues would, from time to time, take sketching trips into Kent and down to the south coast. Narraway went on a walking tour in the Lake District in the 1930s and, in late 1939, went hiking in Switzerland, producing a number of landscapes. When war broke out, he became an agricultural worker for the duration. Throughout the war period he continued to paint landscape and observational works, regularly exhibiting at the Royal Academy from 1942.
Following the war, he became a very successful freelance commercial artist, building his home (incorporating a studio) overlooking the village green in Holmbury St Mary in the Surrey Hills, called “Limnery” (the place of the artist or ‘limner’), where he lived for the rest of his life.
His commercial work included cover illustrations for the John Bull magazine, and illustrations for a number of books, including Biggles Flies North. ​
Portraiture
Following a cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery in the early 1950s, Narraway decided to focus on his passion for portraiture, and built a reputation as a significant post war portrait artist across a relatively short active portraiture career of only some 20 years.
From family portraits in pastels and oils, his commissions expanded to include business leaders, well-known musicians and actors, and senior church, military and academic figures, culminating in a number of commissions to paint HM Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Anne. He had started preparatory work on a group painting of the Queen with Prince Philip, which was to hang in the Law Society Hall, when he died.
Portraits of HM Queen Elizabeth II
1972: for the Royal Engineers, hung in the Mess at Chatham, the first to feature a royal corgi;
the painting was later badly damaged by fire
1974: for the Royal Engineers Training Brigade, hung in Minley Manor, holding a red rose
1978: for the Institution of Civil Engineers, hung in London, in an aquamarine dress, holding
English wild flowers, the first painting to show the Queen smiling
1978: for the Royal Engineers, hung in the Mess at Chatham, to replace the fire-damaged
original, in the same composition including a royal corgi, but with the Queen holding
a rose
1979: commission for the Law Society, a group portrait including the Queen and Prince Philip, for which a composition had been prepared and early sittings had been held with Prince Philip; Narraway died a few days before the first sittings with the Queen were to have taken place.
1982: unaware that he had died, he was selected (on the basis of the Palace’s photographs of previous royal paintings) for a commission for a portrait of the Queen by Uppingham School. Uppingham instead obtained a 1978 portrait in pastels from his estate, matching their commission requirements, which now hangs in company with their existing portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.
He was commissioned in 1972 for a portrait of Princess Anne for the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, an informal sketch of which was exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1973.
Other notable portraits
​
Church: the Archbishop of Canterbury (Donald Coggan), the Bishop of Guildford (George Reindorp), the Dean of Exeter Cathedral
Arts: Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Adrian Boult, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Augustus John (pencil sketch), Tony Britton, Susan Hampshire, Harry Rabinowitz
Academic: headteachers of Cranleigh, Kimbolton and Queenswood Schools; Masters and professors of Cambridge colleges (Jesus, Corpus Christi, Sidney Sussex, St John’s, Darwin).
Over his career, Narraway completed some 600 paintings. By the time of his death he was well established among the top flight of his generation of portrait artists, much in demand and with a substantial list of pending commissions for his works. Narraway’s remaining body of work has remained largely untouched since 1979.
His Process
“I look at people all the time but never really see anyone unless I have a pencil in my hand. Then I do look at them, the shadows on their face, the bone structure, the look that is unique to them. Everything is changing all the time, the expression, even the flesh tones, the way the light plays on them.”
​
“It is a great privilege, not only to be able to live by painting but to have the opportunity to meet people and get to know them, to try to capture the uniqueness which is theirs”.
​
Narraway made a point of talking to his sitters while they sat for him: “I always talk to my sitters – there has to be a line of communication to bring out the life force, to make the face alive. Of course I tell them to expect some funny answers – I may say anything when I’m concentrating on the work.” It also helped that he was hugely sociable and took a great interest in everyone, and it was unsurprising that many of his sitters became family friends.
​
For a period he would routinely paint fresh flowers in his portraits, for example bringing a posy for Queen Elizabeth II to hold in his portrait in 1978 for the Institution of Civil Engineers. “I went through a period of always having flowers somewhere in my portraits. I stopped that when I thought it was becoming a cliché, but they were always real flowers. It was often a simple daisy or wild flower – it might be a rose, but it was always one from my own garden, unique, personal, caught at a particular moment in time.”
​
He attached great importance to the hands of his sitters, perhaps best exemplified in his series of paintings of conductors (Sir Adrian Boult, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc) for which he sat among the orchestra during rehearsals to sketch. His painting of Sir Malcolm Sargent “was from one of several big studies I did from hundreds of drawings done while he was conducting at concerts in a variety of places, BBC studios, the Festival Hall, the Albert Hall. During the intervals, sitting in the dressing room with him talking and drawing, I got to know his conducting style very well; certain positions of his arms and hands recurred during certain passages of music. I would wait for these moments, then work furiously.”
​
Other works
In addition to commissioned works, Narraway painted a number of landscapes, across (inter alia) the Lake District, Cornwall, Venice and Switzerland, and around Surrey. He also painted a number of observational genre subjects including footballers, miners, family groups, musicians, villagers in pubs and playing shove-halfpenny; and a number of still life flower paintings. Some of these were sold from RA and other exhibitions. Only occasionally have his works appeared at auction.
​
Narraway also undertook portrait sculpture. As well as family commissions, these included bronze heads of Sir Malcolm Sargent (for the Royal Festival Hall) and of Sir Adrian Boult. His last sculpture, cast in bronze after he died, was a maquette of Rudolf Nureyev.
​
In a joint exhibition between the RP and the SPS in 1971, Narraway was the only artist exhibiting both paintings and sculpture as a member of each organisation, being (at the time) the only artist to have been elected as a member of both.
Village life
Narraway settled in Holmbury St Mary after the war, becoming embedded in many aspects of village life. He was a member of the local parish council for 26 years.
​
He was a keen cricketer (as was his father), becoming Holmbury’s captain for about 16 years. This frequently required touring the local pubs to drum up a team for the next weekend. His bowling was of the “couple of hops and a flick of the fingers” variety, likely to confuse all concerned, creating similar chances of a six, a catch or a stumping. He replanted a number of the
rhododendrons to be found across Holmbury Hill, into positions around the outside of the boundary
fence, and designed and helped to build the current pavilion.
​
Narraway sang with the village choral society which took part (and still does) in the annual Leith Hill
Music Festivals, where he could sketch Vaughan Williams conducting, while singing in the combined
choirs.
​
He took to the stage in village Victorian Extravaganza shows, always heavily bewhiskered, to take
the audience through poems and songs including The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Green Eye of
The Little Yellow God and The Bird in a Gilded Cage. A change to the routine of the latter in rehearsal
led to the compere laughing so much he fell off the stage and dislocated his shoulder.
​
Narraway was chairman of the village Bonfire Association, designing the armatures of nursery rhyme
figures to which coloured portfires were fastened and fused together on his garage floor. These could
be manipulated with jointed limbs, and moved around the display area on long poles to bring rhymes
like “Hey Diddle Diddle” to life. His portrait of the Master of Kimbolton School introduced him to the
Rev Ron Lancaster who taught there and founded Kimbolton Fireworks, allowing him to purchase
portfires in bulk.
Family
Narraway married Olive (1921-2019) in the final year of the war. They moved from Hampton Court to Surrey, first to Abinger Fruit Farm, and then a few miles further south to Holmbury St Mary, where they bought land above the village green from the Waterhouse Estate, designing and building Limnery.
​
Their first child, Paul, died a few days after his birth. They had two further sons, Stephen (1948-2023) and Nicholas (born 1956).
