Donald Hamilton Fraser Biography
Donald Hamilton Fraser was born in London in 1929, he is famous for his landscape and figurative works which have defined his long and successful artistic career. Fraser was educated at Maidenhead Grammar School in Berkshire and soon after trained as a journalist with Kemsley newspapers. After completing his military service in 1949, he decided to pursue his deep interest in painting and attended St Martins School of Art from 1949 to 1952. Having already attracted some notoriety, in 1953 the Gimpel Fils gallery in London gave him the his first opportunity for many solo shows. That same year he was awarded a scholarship to study in Paris for a year, where he began to fully embrace his abilities and confidence as a painter. In 1958 Fraser was employed as a tutor in the painting school of the Royal College of Art, where he remained for 25 years. In 1970 Fraser was appointed a Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 1983 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1985 and subsequently became a trustee in 1994. From 1986 to 2000 he was a Fellow of the Royal Fine Art Commission and from 1992 to 2000 he was honorary curator of the Royal Academy. With a widely celebrated body of work spanning over fifty years, Fraser's work has been exhibited in major galleries and cities around the world, including Paris, New York, Tokyo, Jerusalem and Zurich. His work appears in public collections, including HM The Queen, City Art Galleries (Hull, Nottingham, Reading, Cheltenham, Southampton and Guilford), the Arts Council of Great Britain and the National Gallery in New South Wales (Melbourne, Australia).
Fraser has participated in many of the most significant exhibitions of British works, including the Royal Academy's "25 Years of British Painting". He taught alongside other leading British artists such as Sir Peter Blake in the 1960s and taught some of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century, including David Hockney, Patrick Caufield and R.B. Kitaj. After much study and travel, including tutoring at the Royal College of Art, contacts with the post-war Ecole de Paris and a long relationship with the Royal Academy, Donald spent his final years with his wife by the river at Henley on Thames.
