Carel Weight

Carel Weight spent much of his childhood with a foster mother in London’s working-class neighborhood of Fulham. Accordingly, many of his later works showed motifs from the west and south of London. The contrast between deprivation and affluence ran like a thread through his entire painting career.

From 1926-29, Weight studied at the Hammersmith School of Art and the following three years at the Goldsmith’s College. From 1931, he exhibited at the Royal Academy, later becoming a full member himself. His first solo exhibition came in 1933. During these years Weight made his living as a teacher at the Beckenham School of Art.

In the last year of World War II, he became an official war painter in Austria, Greece and Italy. From 1947-57, he was a tutor and subsequently a professor of painting at the Royal College of Art until his retirement in 1973. In 1962, Weight was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1982 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University.

Many of his paintings are ostensibly realistic but feature peculiar perspective effects and strange human dramas creating a sometimes humorous, sometimes menacing mood. His works are present in public collections such as the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum. They also include murals for the Festival of Britain (1951) and for the Manchester Cathedral (1963), as well as portraits and landscapes. Weight married fellow painter Helen Roeder (1909-1999) in 1990 after having lived with her for 60 years already.

The submitted painting Soccer Players may correspond to Last Minute Goal? (oil on panel, 88 cm x 88 cm) from 1949.