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Charles March Gere (5 June 1869 – 3 August 1957) was an English painter, book illustrator, and stained glass and embroidery designer. He became known as a painter of landscapes with figures in oil, tempera
Term applied to any paint in which the pigment is dissolved in water and mixed with an organic gum or glue., and watercolour, and was for a time associated with William Morris’s arts and crafts movement.[1]
Gere was born in Gloucester, the only child of the American Edward Williams Gere and his second wife Emma; Edward Williams Gere had moved to the UK from Massachusetts following the death of his first wife. Charles Gere won scholarships to Birmingham School of Art, where he studied and taught under Edward Taylor, who did much to sustain the arts and crafts movement.[1] Gere worked with William Morris at the Kelmscott Press and later at the Ashendene Press, and was instrumental in making the Birmingham School a centre of excellence for book design, arguing that illustrations and type should be complementary.[2]
Gere’s half-sister, Margaret
English artist (1878–1965) who often worked in tempera on portraits, still lifes and narrative scenes., herself a distinguished painter, studied under him at Birmingham School of Art from 1897, and was with him an original member of the Birmingham School of Painters and Craftsmen.[1][3] In 1904 he and Margaret settled at Painswick, then a quiet village in the unspoilt Cotswolds, ushering in the best period of his art in the small landscapes inspired by the Cotswold countryside.[1]
Gere was a member of the New English Art Club and the Royal Watercolour Society, and exhibited with the Royal Academy, of which he was elected an associate in 1934 and a Royal Academician in 1939. He never married, and died at the Royal Hospital in Gloucester on 3 August 1957.[1]
