Bernard Cheese

Bernard Cheese was born in Sydenham (1925) and attended Beckenham School of Art. After an interlude in the army he took further training at the Royal College of Art (1947). There he studied under Edward Bawden and John Nash, and also Edwin La Dell. La Dell, whose especial interest was in lithography, encouraging Cheese to turn his sketches of London – of public houses, markets and parks – into lithographic prints.

At the Royal Academy Bernard Cheese met fellow artist Sheila Robinson. They married in 1951, and Chloe (now a celebrated artist herself) was born in 1952, and Benjamin, their son, in 1954. Both Cheese and Robinson worked with Bawden to produce murals for the Festival of Britain, but Bawden also influenced their move to Great Bardfield, a village in Essex where he lived, and where a number of other artists, including Michael Rothenstien, John Aldridge and Eric Ravilious also lived. Cheese and Robinson then commuted back to London to work, both to teach printmaking, Cheese at St. Martin’s School of Art, and Robinson at The Royal College of Art.

In 1958 Cheese and Robinson divorced, and Cheese married his former student Brenda Latham Brown. They had two daughters, Joanna and Sarah. Over the following two decades Bernard Cheese would consolidate in both subject matter and characteristic style: he had a fascination with landscape and the patterns imposed by man onto the land, and with the kind of architecture found in the working landscape: farmhouses, fisherman’s cottages. Later he would turn increasingly to still lives, but all of his work evinces an attractive whimsicality and sense of humour. The structure of the work is always sound, with good composition and fine draughtsmanship, but this light-hearted humour is a hallmark of many of Bernard Cheese’s prints.