David Remfry

Over his long and successful career David Remfry MBE RARWS has achieved a mastery of watercolour that few have matched. Unusually for the medium, he works on a large scale and often focuses on people, exploring the dance hall and the nightclub in breathtaking images that are at once beautiful, and edgy.

This book is the first full-length monograph devoted to the artist's watercolours. Its author, James Russell, is well known for his writing on 20th-century British artists. Russell brings his scholarship, humour and fascination for people and their lives to his study of Remfry’s career, tracing the evolution of a remarkable talent, looking in depth at the most significant works and placing Remfry in the context of both the British watercolour tradition and international contemporary painting. This is at once a glorious art book and an intimate portrait of city life.

Having spent 20 years living and working at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, Remfry has a following on both sides of the Atlantic. New Yorkers – often in party mode – feature in many of his watercolours, and his recollections of people and places add colour to the text.

David Remfry MBE RA (born 1942 in Worthing, England) is a contemporary British painter and curator. He has also been the Eranda Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy Schools since 2016.