MutualArt
Maurice Frederick Codner (27 September 1888 – 10 March 1958) was an English portrait painter. He was born in Stoke Newington, London, the third son of the iron merchant William Aquires Codner and his wife Ada Mary Payne. Nothing is known of his early life except that he was educated at the Stationers’ Company School.[1]
In 1913 Codner married Eleanor Marion, daughter of Thomas Fairfield, a captain in the mercantile marine. During the First World War he served in France in the Royal Devon hussars. In the 1920s he was employed as a part-time assistant curator at the Iveagh Bequest in London, and at some point attended the Colchester Schol of Art. After abandoning his employment, he set himself up as a full-time potrtait painter, exhibiting mostly at the Royal Society of Portrait painters, of which he became a member in 1937.[1][2]
Many of Codner’s portraits are best described as “good likenesses rather than a penetrating analysis of character”. At his peak in the 1940s and early 1950s he was producing ten to fifteen such “routine portraits” a year, often assisted by his only son, John Whitlock Orby Squires Codner. Although primarily a painter of portraits, Codner also produced the occasional landscape.[1]
Codner died at Beaumont House, Beaumont Street, London, on 10 March 1958 and was buried at Dedham, Essex. His parents had owned property in Dedham, and it was where, while out hunting, he had met the artist Alfred Munnings, who subsequently encouraged him in his artistic career.[1]
