Penn, Walter Edward (1881-1959)

When Walter Edward Penn was born on 10 June 1881, in Lambeth, London, his father, Walter Edward Penn, was 26 and his mother, Louisa Kate Andrews, was 25.

Penn had only two terms of artistic tuition at Bedford School of Art and thereafter was largely self taught. He married Annie Eliza Milner in 1905, and settled in Bosham, West Sussex, that year in a house ‘The Whym’ he had designed himself. Penn first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1912, a watercolour ‘Stones’ which was hung ‘on the line’. In the period to 1945, Penn showed a total of five works at the Royal Academy and another two with the Royal Cambrian Academy. However, most of his work was exhibited in the large provincial shows held in places such as Brighton, Southsea and Chichester. During the 1920s Penn, his first wife and son, would spend the winters at their villa in St Tropez. Also in the 1920s he painted some fairy subjects at Hunstanton in north Norfolk. In 1931 he moved to Creek House in Bosham and in 1941 he remarried. In 1952 Penn held an exhibition in his studio of about ninety of his paintings which proved popular, especially the local views of Bosham. He was a man of great Christian faith.

We were generously sent this biography by Grant M. Waters, author of the Dictionary of British Artists working from 1900-1950, who had gathered the information from the artists second wife in the mid 1970s.