Antony Donaldson

Antony Donaldson was a British painter and sculptor whose early Pop Art canvases of cars and women, and later public sculptures such as the Buddha-like Hitchcock head at Gainsborough Studios, placed him among the defining London artists of the 1960s generation. Born in Godalming, Surrey, on 2 September 1939, he was the son of Squadron Leader John William Donaldson, a fighter pilot killed in action in June 1940. Boarding school and an itinerant childhood followed. He studied at Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art in 1957 to 1958 and at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1958 to 1962, winning a University of London postgraduate fine-art award in 1962 to 1963.

While still a student he exhibited with the Young Contemporaries and The London Group, and in 1962 he was elected president of the Young Contemporaries. Friendships with Royal College of Art contemporaries including Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips linked him to the London Pop Art vanguard even though he never studied at the RCA. From 1962 he developed a simplified, hard-edged treatment of the female figure that critics such as Marco Livingstone later described as both sexually alluring and oddly innocent. Racing cars, planes and searchlight beams entered the same sensuous vocabulary.

Critical recognition came quickly. His first solo show at the Rowan Gallery in 1963 led the Tate to buy Take Five. The Arts Council, British Council and Contemporary Art Society also acquired works. In 1964 he won a prize in the John Moores Painting Prize and appeared in Bryan Robertson's New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery alongside David Hockney, Bridget Riley and others. In 1965 he represented Britain at the Biennale des Jeunes Artistes in Paris. A Harkness Fellowship took him to Los Angeles from 1966, where contact with Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and others fed a series of cinema and beach paintings that explored light, reflection and isometric space.

Later decades brought shirt-front portraits, French beach and Ingres-inspired tondo works, and a turn to sculpture in marble, corten and other media. His best-known public piece is Master of Suspense (2003), the giant Hitchcock head in the courtyard of Gainsborough Picture studios. Works entered collections including the British Museum, MoMA New York, Tate, Walker Art Gallery, Berardo Collection and Art Gallery of New South Wales. He lived and worked between London and southwest France with his wife Patricia Marks; they had two sons, Matthew and Lee. He died on 21 August 2026 after a short illness, aged 86, with The Times publishing a major obituary in late September.