Charles David Jones Bryant
Encyclopedia
Charles David Jones Bryant (11 May 1883 – 22 January 1937), known as Charles Bryant, was an Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n marine artist.

Bryant was born at Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

, the fifth son of John Ambrose Bryant, storekeeper, and his wife Caroline, née Leedon. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School
Sydney Grammar School
Sydney Grammar School is an independent, non-denominational, selective, day school for boys, located in Darlinghurst, Edgecliff and St Ives, all suburbs of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia....

 and studied the cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...

. He then obtained a position in the Bank of New South Wales.

Bryant studied painting at Sydney under W. Lister Lister
W. Lister Lister
William Lister Lister was an Australian painter who won the Wynne Prize seven times.He was born in Manly, a suburb of Sydney...

, and was an exhibitor at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales for some years. He went to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in 1908 and studied with John Hassall at London and Julius Olsson, A.R.A., at St Ives, Cornwall. He exhibited at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...

 and the Paris Salon, where he received an honourable mention for "Morning Mists" in 1913, and with many well-known societies. He was appointed an official war artist on the western front in 1917 and did many paintings for the Australian government. Sixty-nine of his paintings are in the Australian War Memorial
Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial is Australia's national memorial to the members of all its armed forces and supporting organisations who have died or participated in the wars of the Commonwealth of Australia...

, Canberra
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...

.

In 1922 he returned to Australia, and in 1923 was sent to the mandated territories in New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...

 to paint scenes of the occupation by the Australians. In 1925 he painted a picture of the American fleet which was presented by Sydney citizens to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 government. This picture is now at the Capitol, Washington. Returning to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, some 10 years passed before Bryant was in Australia again. He had a very successful one man show at Sydney towards the end of 1936, which was followed by another at Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

. He died at Manly, Sydney on 22 January 1937. He was unmarried.

Bryant was an able oil painter mostly of marine subjects. He held various official positions with art societies, having been a member of the council of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters
Royal Institute of Oil Painters
The Royal Institute of Oil Painters, also known as ROI, is an association of painters in London and is the only major art society which features work done only in oil. It is a member society of the Federation of British Artists.-History:...

, a vice-president of the Royal Art Society, Sydney, and president of the London Sketch Club
London Sketch Club
The London Sketch Club was founded on 1 April 1898 as a social club for artists working in the field of commercial graphic art, mainly for newspapers, periodicals and books. The founder members were Dudley Hardy, Phil May, Walter Fowler, Lance Thackeray, Cecil Aldin, W Sanders Fiske, Walter...

. He is represented in the Sydney
Australian Museum
The Australian Museum is the oldest museum in Australia, with an international reputation in the fields of natural history and anthropology. It features collections of vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, as well as mineralogy, palaeontology, and anthropology...

, Melbourne
National Gallery of Victoria
The National Gallery of Victoria is an art gallery and museum in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. Since December 2003, NGV has operated across two sites...

, Adelaide, Castlemaine and Manly galleries, the Australian War Memorial, and the Imperial War Museum
Imperial War Museum
Imperial War Museum is a British national museum organisation with branches at five locations in England, three of which are in London. The museum was founded during the First World War in 1917 and intended as a record of the war effort and sacrifice of Britain and her Empire...

, London.
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