A teacher – and student

Following a teacher-training course Bradford worked in various schools in the Surrey Docks area of east London and in Wandsworth Prison. He also took evening classes in Fine Art and English at Morley College (‘for Working Men and Women’) under Mrs Hubbock, whom he described as ‘enlightened’. Colin MacInnes – whose flat Jim borrowed for a time – taught English there. Rupert Doone, who had been the last solo dancer with Diaghilev, taught Theatre. Doone was a friend of the artist Robert Medley, of Group Theatre, with whom Bradford would go on to work as a scene painter and prop maker for productions of Sartre’s The Flies and Huis Clos at the New Theatre near Leicester Square. Bernard Meadows made statues and Medley designed the sets. Kathleen Hale also designed sets and costumes. Bradford later worked at the Theatre Royal, Barnstaple with The John Gay Players, soaking ‘flats’ and repainting them, and building scenery, sets and props.

While taking evening classes at the Chelsea School of Art, Bradford was encouraged by his tutor, Robert Buhler, to enrol as a full-time mature student. He completed a four-year NDD (National Diploma in Design) in Painting in 1952. Taught by such artists as Ceri Richards and Robert Medley, his contemporaries at Chelsea included John Latham, Christopher Mason, Anthony Whishaw and Elizabeth Frink. While there he knew John Berger, became friends with architecture critic and historian Peter Reyner Banham and his wife, Mary, and married Betty Bateman (now Elzea – later a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and biographer of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Frederick Sandys). She describes Bradford as having been ‘an outstandingly talented draughtsman’. In 1953 the headmaster of Chelsea, H. S. Williamson, described Bradford’s ability as ‘above average’, adding that ‘he was notable for his energy and powers of concentration. […] Nor was there any doubt about his having found his right métier, for his enthusiasm for art was well sustained. […] Mr Bradford has a self-reliant and somewhat forceful personality…’

Keen to continue his study, Bradford completed a postgraduate Art Teaching Diploma at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1953, while teaching at Owen’s School. The department head, Mr Davison, wrote in a letter of reference that, ‘over a considerable number of years I have had many art student teachers from various training colleges in London and I can say without the shadow of a doubt that Mr J. R. Bradford is one of the most outstanding’. Bradford went on to work as an art therapist on the tuberculosis ward of Harefield Hospital. In 1955 he was taken on as a lecturer at Epsom School of Art, and from 1958 he lectured in History of Art at the Workers’ Educational Association. At this time he lodged for periods with his long-time friend, the painter Albert Irvin RA.

In 1960 Bradford began working as a gilder. He trained with the picture framer Robert Savage in South Kensington, went on to work for Robert Sielle in the Mission Hall, Kensington Square and, later, became master gilder for Alfred Hecht, whose premises were on the King’s Road, Chelsea. By this time Bradford was recognised as the foremost gilder in the country and worked on frames for the most important painters of the day, including Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Ceri Richards, William Scott, Max Ernst, Ivon Hitchens, Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Clients included the Marlborough Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as the Royal Collection. Bradford was introduced to Hecht’s varied and lively social circle, meeting such personalities as René Magritte and Oskar Kokoschka, Francis Bacon, John and Myfanwy Piper and Sonia Orwell (wife of George). Despite devoting considerable time and resources to a passion for classic cars (owning a Lancia, an Alvis, a Lagonda and a Rolls Royce), Bradford kept up his painting alongside the framing work, producing still lives in oil and landscapes in watercolour on trips to France.

Bradford returned to teaching in 1966, lecturing in Graphics and Life Drawing at the Central School of Art and Design until 1972, where his students included Posy Simmonds and Peter Brookes. Having been divorced from Betty and living in a mews flat in Notting Hill with his new partner, Elisabeth Armstrong, Bradford worked as a freelance picture framer and gilder, painting whenever possible. He sold his work privately and also exhibited pieces in mixed shows at the New Grafton Gallery on Bond Street. Armstrong was an artist and designer and exhibited and sold her work at the General Trading Company in Sloane Square. She had also trained at Chelsea School of Art and the two had met while working on the Gethsemane Chapel for their friend Steven Sykes in the new Coventry Cathedral. This was designed by Sykes’s friend Sir Basil Spence, the two having conducted camouflage exercises together in northern France during the war. Bradford gilded the background to the bas-relief (designed by Sykes and made by Armstrong in ciment fondu) in 23 ¼-carat gold.

Jim and Elisabeth Bradford, who had married in 1971, moved to Barnes, a quieter part of London, in 1974 to start a family. Their daughter, Sophie, was born in 1975. As well as building furniture, bookshelves, dressers and cupboards for their house, Bradford continued as a freelance picture framer, working from home until 1981 when he finally decided to devote his time to painting. Elisabeth opened an art-and-craft boutique and gift shop on Barnes High Street, which she ran successfully for twenty-seven years. To support it in its earliest days Bradford made wooden items to sell in the shop. These included carved and gilded fruit and children’s toys. He also made fixtures and fittings for the shop and undertook much of the accounting, as well as ‘bearing the brunt’, as he would later put it, of parenting. Nonetheless, working in a studio at home, this period marked Bradford’s most prolific as an artist. His style developed dramatically, but he never shifted his focus far from the still life as motif. Occasional ‘views from the window’ and ‘landscapes’ on holiday in the south of France are the exceptions. Indeed, Bradford spent a working holiday with his best friend, the art and antiquities dealer, John Hewett, in Aix-en-Provence. There they traced the routes of Cézanne through the Bibemus quarry and to Le Tholonet, in the shadow of the Mont Ste Victoire. Keen collectors of antiques themselves, the Bradfords amassed a huge collection of pots, jugs, vases and unusual fabrics, many African, which Jim would arrange to create the combination of pattern and colour which marked his ‘flattened’ canvases. Elisabeth was also an expert gardener, and her flowers and plants often featured in the paintings; Red Tulips and Rose Fantin-Latour are examples.

Bradford sold some of his early watercolours in Elisabeth’s shop (Margaret Thatcher’s sister-in-law was an enthusiastic patron) before he moved exclusively to oil. He also exhibited paintings in various mixed exhibitions, including at the New Grafton Gallery (which had also moved to Barnes), the Chelsea Art Society, ‘Contemporary Art’ at Christies and The Guardian’s ‘Art for Sale’, alongside several private sales.

Bradford’s health rapidly deteriorated following a fall in 1998 while installing a picture light above one of his paintings at home, but his artistic output only grew. By 2003 he was very frail but fortunately able to attend the private view of his solo show held at the Collins and Hastie gallery in Chelsea. The catalogue introduction was written by his great friend, the art writer Mel Gooding (1941-2021), who observed that, ‘with these glorious anarchic late paintings Bradford has come at last into his own. He gives full rein to a freedom of stylistic device that derives from his study of those who followed Cézanne, most notably the great Parisians, Picasso, Braque and Matisse. I invoke these names in particular simply to indicate the certain sources of the distinctive language that Bradford has developed’. Buyers at the show included the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir David Calvert-Smith and the architect Will Alsop, whose painting later featured in an Independent magazine piece. The exhibition was a resounding success and many further paintings were sold privately at this time.

Bradford died just a few months later, in June 2004, four days before his eighty-second birthday.