Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1902

Henry Tonks, FRCS (9 April 1862 – 8 January 1937) was a British draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He was an influential art teacher and a surgeon.

He was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the French Impressionists; he exhibited with the New English Art Club, and was an associate of many of the more progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George Clausen.

Life and work

Henry Tonks, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1922

Tonks was born in Birmingham. After being educated at Clifton College, he studied medicine at Brighton (1882–85) and London Hospital (1885–1888). After qualifying he became a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London; but from 1888 he studied under Frederick Brown at Westminster School of Art in the evenings.

From 1892, he taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, (from 1918 to 1930 as Slade Professor of Fine Art) where he became "the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation". Pupils of Tonks at the Slade included William Lionel Clause, Ian Fairweather, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Augustus John, Mukul Dey, Gwen John, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer, Rex Whistler, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, and Isaac Rosenberg. His sarcasm there drove F. M. Mayor's sister Alice to leave before completing her training. As a student Paul Nash, recalled Tonks’ withering manner:

"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."

In 1895, he became a member of the New English Art Club.

As a qualified surgeon, from 1916 to 1918, Tonks worked for Harold Gillies producing pastel drawings recording facial injury cases at Aldershot and the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup, - 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 in 2002. Tonks was an Official War Artist towards the end of the Great War and 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. In 1919, as an official War Artist Tonks went to Archangel in Russia.

A year before his death an exhibition of his work was held in London at the Tate Gallery.

Gallery

• 

  Henry Tonks. The Hat Shop (1892), oil on canvas.

• 

  Henry Tonks. Sodales: Mr Steer and Mr Sickert (1930).

Further reading

• E. Chambers, Henry Tonks: art and surgery (2002)
• 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)
• L. Morris (ed.), Henry Tonks and the 'art of pure drawing' (1985)
• J. Rothenstein, 'Henry Tonks 1862-1937', in J. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters Sickert To Smith (1952)
• J. Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (1939)
• Tate Gallery, Exhibition of Works by Professor Henry Tonks [exhibition catalogue] (1936), 7p.
• Emma Chambers, "Fragmented Identities: Reading Subjectivity in Henry Tonks' Surgical Portraits," Art History, 32,3 (2009), 578-607.