John Ward

John Stanton Ward, painter: born Hereford 10 October 1917; staff, Vogue 1948-52; RA 1966 (resigned 1997); Vice-President, Royal Society of Portrait Painters 1980-85; CBE 1985; married 1950 Alison Williams (four sons, two daughters); died Bilting, Kent 14 June 2007.

John Ward was a painter and draughtsman of exceptional ability, whose work has an enduring appeal for anyone interested in the poetry of the everyday. He is perhaps best known as a portrait painter. The National Portrait Gallery holds 15 examples of his work, including a poignant watercolour of Walter de la Mare from 1956, and a beautiful and sensitive oil of the Princess Royal (1987-88). Between portraits he travelled and painted landscape and architecture in watercolour.

He referred to book illustration as his recreation, a typically unassuming comment from a man whose drawings for Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie (1959) added so much to its lasting success. Among the many books he illustrated were H.E. Bates's An Autobiography (in three volumes, 1969-72) and Joyce Grenfell's George, don't do that . . . (1977). He also painted his friend Grenfell's portrait.

John Stanton Ward was born in 1917 in Hereford, son of Russell Stanton Ward, an antique dealer and picture-restorer. The family lived above the shop, near Hereford Cathedral, and enjoyed picnics and boating on the River Wye. Ward wrote:

Years later, when I came to read that masterpiece The Diary of a Nobody, I recognised much of my family, the same snobbishness, the same deep affections, hopes and foolishness. We were very much a Pooter family, but there was no doubt that we enjoyed life.

Ward attended the local elementary school, St Owen's, where the sympathetic headmaster arranged for him to take junior classes at Hereford art school. In 1932, aged 15, he became a full-time student there and began his apprenticeship as a draughtsman and painter.

After four years of what he called "blissful schooling", it was time to broaden his horizons. Taking his courage in both hands, the young Ward wrote to Sir William Rothenstein, then Principal of the Royal College of Art, explaining his ambitious yet penurious state. Rothenstein saw talent in Ward's work and elected to help him, with the result that in 1936 he was able to move to London and enrol at the RCA where his teachers were to include Gilbert Spencer, Barnett Freedman and Percy Horton. With such distinguished mentors, his work took off and he won a prize for his drawing.

In October 1939, Ward joined up as a Royal Engineer, and later took part in the D-Day landings. In every available moment he drew his surroundings with sympathy and exactness. (In a recent letter he wrote: "One thing the Army taught me was to set out what one had - the good husbandry of life.") He returned briefly to the RCA after the war to complete his studentship, winning the Travelling Scholarship for 1947. Ward used the money to reacquaint himself with England, and there were idyllic moments wandering through Herefordshire and the North Riding of Yorkshire drawing for travel guides.

But a living had to be earned, and Ward turned to magazines and the advertising industry in search of a regular income. For four years he worked for Vogue (1948-52), drawing fashion models, whilst also teaching part-time at Wimbledon School of Art. It was while working at Vogue that Ward met and became friends with Norman Parkinson, whom he always credited with teaching him how to entertain the model. It is thus deeply appropriate that Parkinson's photographic portrait of Ward in the National Portrait Gallery is of him painting a nude.

In 1950 he married Alison Williams, with whom he had four sons and two daughters (one the painter Celia Ward, born 1957). Initially they lived in London, in a rented studio in Glebe Place, before moving to Folkestone and finally settling at Bilting, a hamlet outside Ashford in Kent, where he made his studio in an old courthouse.

Here, under a massive beamed ceiling, with his beloved canaries flying free, John Ward painted and drew almost to the end of a long and productive life. Here he received his sitters and portrayed them with perception and affection; here he painted the elegant and tender nudes for which he was justly celebrated; here he composed the still-life paintings much sought-after by his admirers. He continued to travel widely, and had only just returned from a trip to Venice, in search of material for his 90th birthday exhibition. His watercolours of buildings were always very fine, and he loved to depict the interior of Florian's or a café in the Piazzetta.

His first solo exhibition was at Wildenstein's in 1954, later showing regularly with the Maas Gallery, and latterly with Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. In 1956 he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and RA in 1965. He was an active member of the Academy, serving as Trustee from 1985 to 1993, and it was a great sadness to him that he felt impelled to resign in 1997 over a disagreement with the Academy's artistic policy.

He was also a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC) and a former Vice-President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, which he joined in 1952. In 1982 he was made Hon DLitt of the University of Kent at Canterbury, and in 1985 appointed CBE. He was also a freeman of the cities of Hereford and Canterbury. In 1991 he published a book called The Paintings of John Ward, which included an amusing memoir and detailed commentary on his pictures.

Technically versatile, working happily in oils, watercolour, pastel, pen and ink, Ward also painted two murals for the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian at Challock in Kent. The first, completed in 1956, depicts the Baptism of Christ, and the second, commissioned to celebrate the Millennium, and painted in 1999, is of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. He wrote in 1979:

I don't think my work falls into any definite periods or styles since my early aim to paint what I see has never become any easier or any less absorbing. It is something which not only needs a lifetime but also constant practice.

Ward possessed a refreshing modesty. "I cling to my pleasure in being an unimportant painter", he wrote, "so that I may indulge to the full the exercise of my old-fashioned skills". He took intense pleasure in life and art. "Aren't we lucky to be mixed up in this writing-painting lark!" he wrote to me this year.

His enthusiasm was wonderfully contagious, and continually present in his work. "When I was on form, the act of drawing was a joy." It is the evidence of this joy, manifest in a large and impressively varied body of work, which will continue to delight us.

Andrew Lambirth