Watercolours and drawings Gentleman paints and draws landscapes, buildings and people, and uses drawing in his design work. Many of his watercolours have been made in London and
Suffolk and around
Britain, on extended travels in France, Italy and
India, and during briefer spells in
South Carolina, East Africa, the Pacific and
Brazil. He has held many exhibitions of these works. Commissioned series of watercolours have included landscapes for
Shell, several Oxford Almanacks for the
Oxford University Press, and interiors of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the FCO. His drawings and watercolours have been reproduced on textiles and wallpapers, dinner plates for
Wedgwood and on a
Covent Garden mug for
David Mellor. His architectural drawings have appeared in
House & Garden, The Sunday Times, New York Magazine, and on the
RIBA's series of Everyday Architecture wallcharts. His most recently published watercolours were made as illustrations for
My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020.
Wood engravings and a mural on the Underground Gentleman's early wood engravings were for
Penguin paperbacks, greetings cards, wine lists, press ads, and books –
Swiss Family Robinson and
John Clare's ''The Shepherd's Calendar''. He engraved a series of 32 covers for the
New Penguin Shakespeare series. His wood engravings appear on many of his stamps, and in a 100-metre-long mural, his most widely seen public work. In 1978,
London Transport commissioned the platform-length
Eleanor Cross murals on the underground at
Charing Cross station. It shows, as in a strip cartoon, how the medieval workforce built the original cross, from quarrying the stone to setting in place the topmost pinnacle. Its wood-engraved images of
stonemasons and
sculptors, enlarged twenty times to life-size, mirror today's passengers going about their day's work.
Books Between 1982 and 1997, Gentleman wrote and illustrated six travel books:
David Gentleman’s Britain, London, Coastline, Paris, India and
Italy, and more recently
London You’re Beautiful, 2012,
In the Country, 2014 and
My Town: An Artist’s Life in London, 2020. He also wrote and illustrated four books about a small child on holiday:
Fenella in Ireland, Greece, Spain and
the South of France. His latest book is lessons for young artists, 2025.
Illustration Gentleman has illustrated many books by other people, including drawings for the cookbook
Plats du Jour. In 2009 he painted watercolours to illustrate
Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay by
George Ewart Evans. For the Limited Editions Club of New York City he illustrated
The Swiss Family Robinson, Keats's Poems,
The Jungle Book, and
The Ballad of Robin Hood, and several books for children, including
Russell Hoban's
The Dancing Tigers. For the
Folio Society, he produced illustrations for the
Selected Poems of
Edward Thomas. He has designed many paperback covers and jackets: for Penguin Books,
E. M. Forster's novels and the New Penguin Shakespeare wood engravings; for
Faber, many watercolours for
Siegfried Sassoon and
Lawrence Durrell novels; and for
Duckworth, wood engraved or typographical designs for scientific and classical works.
Stamps, coins, and logos Between 1962 and 2000, Gentleman designed 103 stamps for the Post Office, making him the most prolific stamp designer in Britain at that time. These include sets commemorating
Shakespeare,
Churchill,
Darwin, British Ships,
Concorde, the
Battle of Britain, the
Battle of Hastings, the
BBC,
Good King Wenceslas,
The Twelve Days of Christmas, Social Reformers,
Ely Cathedral,
Abbotsbury Swannery and the Millennium. His stamp designs included an album of experimental designs commissioned by
Tony Benn, the then
Postmaster General, to show how stamps could dispense with the large photograph of the Queen then mandatory, or alternatively replace it with a smaller profile silhouette derived initially from
Mary Gillick's coinage head. More than 40 years later, the wider range of subjects, the profile and the simpler designs that it made possible remained a feature of all British special stamps. He won the
Phillips Gold Medal for
postage stamp design in both 1969 and 1979. In 2022, the Royal Mail issued a set of six stamps commemorating Gentleman's designs. The
Royal Mint have issued two of Gentleman's coin designs. The first (issued jointly with the
Monnaie de Paris in 2004) celebrated the centenary of the
Entente Cordiale, and the second in 2007 commemorated the bicentenary of the
Act for the abolition of the slave trade. Other miniature design commissions have included symbols or logos for the
Bodleian Library, British Steel and a redesign of the
National Trust's familiar symbol of a spray of oak leaves.
Posters Gentleman has designed posters for public institutions including
London Transport (Visitors' London and Victorian London), the
Imperial War Museum, and the
Public Record Office. A series in the seventies for the
National Trust, used unconventional designs, photographs and photo-montages; some won design awards. Later, poster-like designs replaced words in his book
A Special Relationship (Faber, 1979) on the US/UK alliance. Gentleman regretted that these images were not displayed as actual posters. On the eve of the
Iraq war in 2003, Gentleman offered the
Stop the War Coalition a poster saying simply 'No', which was carried on the protest march. Other march placards followed, including 'No more lies' and 'Bliar'. His largest design was an installation in 2007 of 100,000 drops of blood, one for each person already killed in that war. The bloodstains were printed on 1,000 sheets of card pegged out in a vast square covering the grass in
Parliament Square.
Lithographs and screenprints Gentleman's first lithographs were posters for a
Royal College of Art theatre group production of
Orphée and a student exhibition, and one of his first commissions was for a large Lyons lithograph. Between 1970 and 2008 he made suites of lithographs of buildings (
Covent Garden,
South Carolina,
Bath) and landscapes (of
Gordale Scar, of the
Seven Sisters, and of
Suffolk subjects). These lithographs were printed in colour and were essentially representational. In 1970 he made six more poster-like screenprints,
Fortifications, published in New York City. A number of these are in the collections of
Tate Britain. ==Bibliography==