Barrington Watson (1931)

Professions: Painter

WATSON BARRINGTON (Jamacian b. 1931)
WATSON, BARRINGTON (jamaican, b .1931)
BARRINGTON WATSON, (Jamaican, b. 1931), Nude, watercolor, Signed lower right
BARRINGTON WATSON, (Jamaican, b. 1931), Nude Back, watercolor, 35 x 24 inches

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Barrington Watson Biography

(b Lucea, Hanover, Jamaica, 9 Dec 1931). Jamaican painter and dealer. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London, the Rijksacademie, Amsterdam, and elsewhere in Europe. In the early 1960s, together with Karl Parboosingh and Eugene Hyde, he was one of the founding members of the Contemporary Jamaican Artists’ Association, which gave impetus to the second generation of the Jamaican Art Movement. His approach was essentially academic and realist, with occasional modernist intrusions. He experimented with abstraction, and in some works he employed a futurist analysis of movement. He is best known for his large-scale, epic depictions of Jamaican life painted in grand academic manner, such as the Garden Party (1976; Bank of Jamaica col.), which is a panoramic commentary on the idiosyncrasies of Jamaican society. He was also a popular portrait painter, and his finest portraits, such as the portrait of Valerie Bloomfield (1962; Kingston, N.G.), have an intimate, immediate quality. He was also well known for his nudes and erotic scenes, painted mainly in oil and watercolour. From 1962 to 1967 he was Director of Studies at the Jamaica School of Art, Kingston.

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