Events in Devon | Devon's Top Attractions

Join Dr Jan D. Cox for this fascinating look into the life and work of John Minton.

Minton was a key artist of the British Neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and ’50s. His talent was for book illustration (Elizabeth David’s ‘Mediterranean Food’) but his ambition was to be a great painter.

Minton inhabited the Colony Rooms in Soho at the same time as Freud and Bacon and produced a fine collection of paintings that have been the subject of major exhibitions in recent years, plus a Mark Gatiss TV documentary.

His students included Peter Blake and Bridget Riley and the little-known Eric Verrico, a young art student who was a member of ‘Johnny’s Circus’. Last year our lecturer Dr. Jan D. Cox met a famous TV actor whose portrait was painted by Minton in 1953! A fascinating story to tell.

Dr Jan D. Cox was awarded a B.A by Oxford Brookes University, which included the Jeanne Sheehy Memorial Prize for his work on Christopher Wood. An M.A. at Bristol followed, where his studies focused on John Minton, Keith Vaughan and British Neo-Romanticism. Subsequently, at the University of Plymouth, he placed online Wyndham Lewis’s art criticism in ‘The Listener’ magazine (1946-51). He was awarded a PhD in History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2014, where he specialised in 19th century Nordic art. He shares his interests between this topic and British art of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In 2017, he was the major contributor to the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Romanticism in the North: From Friedrich to Turner’, where he wrote on the vast majority of the British art. Jan is a regular tutor for Oxford University weekly classes, and tutors an online course for Oxford on the Impressionists. He also tutors for Cambridge University (ICE) and lectures at many arts organisations throughout Britain, including Dillington House. He has addressed conferences in Copenhagen, Montreal, Rome, Oslo, and at Tate Britain and Tate St. Ives.