A draughtsman in London
Born in 1886, Spare won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy while still a teenager. His first illustrated books gave him a means of controlling the entire composition of a page. In A Book of Satyrs, a title such as The Connoisseur or Fashion identifies a social type, while the bodies crowded beneath it supply the satire.
During the First World War he worked as an official war artist. Drawing the world of hospitals and medical work called on the same attention to the human figure that had sustained his fantastic art. In later years he lived and exhibited in south London, often away from the commercial galleries that had noticed him as a young artist.
The artist as his own publisher
The Book of Pleasure, published in 1913, brings drawings and statements about consciousness into the form of a personal occult philosophy. Spare gave his signs meanings tied to his own account of desire and the unconscious. The Focus of Life continued that conversation between text and image. The National Portrait Gallery holds his 1937 self-portrait in pastel.
