Early life Underwood was born in the west London suburb of
Shepherd's Bush. He was the eldest of the three sons of George Underwood, a fine art dealer and he attended Hampden Gurney School. From 1907 to 1910 he attended the
Regent Street Polytechnic in central London before studying at the
Royal College of Art for three years. While still a student in 1911, Underwood was commissioned to paint a mural for the
Peace Palace in
The Hague. In 1913 he visited Russia to study the depiction of horses in traditional Russian art.
World War I In the
First World War, Underwood enlisted in the
Royal Horse Artillery before transferring to a field battery unit and then serving as a Captain in the Camouflage Section of the
Royal Engineers. Underwood's duties on the
Western Front included going into
No man's land to make detailed drawings of trees which were later replaced with metal replicas used by military observers. He sketched and painted scenes of this work, notably in his 1919 oil painting
Erecting a Camouflage Tree, which was intended for the, never built, British national
Hall of Remembrance and was in turn purchased by the
Imperial War Museum.
1920s and 1930s After the war Underwood attended the
Slade School of Art for a year's refresher course and in 1920 received the
British Prix de Rome but chose not to go to Italy, instead using the grant to travel elsewhere later in the decade. In his Hammersmith studio Underwood set up a private art school, the Brook Green School, which he ran, intermittently, until 1938. In 1925, with some of his past pupils, Underwood created the English Wood-Engraving Society to promote the art form. Underwood spent 1926 in the United States where he published an illustrated book of verse,
Animalia, illustrated some volumes by others and also painted and made engravings. In
Greenwich Village he opened a life-drawing school. In 1927 he went to Mexico, spending five months travelling and studying
Aztec and
Mayan art forms. With funding from
Eileen Agar, Underwood co-founded a graphical quarterly magazine,
The Island, in 1931 which, despite contributions from
Henry Moore, Agar,
CRW Nevinson and
Mahatma Gandhi was only published for four issues. From 1932 to 1934, Underwood made a series of sculptures of dancing figures including
Herald of New Day, the plaster cast of which is now in the
Tate collection. In 1934 he published an artistic manifesto, ''Art for Heaven's Sake: Notes on a Philosophy of Art''. Underwood was always convinced that subject matter formed a fundamental role behind the power of both his own and primitive art, and had no belief in subject-less or purely abstract form in his own work. Underwood's 1935
lignum vitae carving
African Madonna, or
Black Virgin, was inspired by a
Bantu carving and is sited in
St George's Cathedral, Cape Town. Underwood's 1937 bronze sculpture of King
George VI, now in the
National Portrait Gallery, London, had originally been intended to be of
Edward VIII but was reworked after the abdication of December 1936. When first shown in public, the
Buckingham Palace authorities asked that it be removed from view. Moore later spoke of his indebtedness to Underwood's teaching. In 1961 Underwood was elected an Honorary Member of the
Royal Society of Sculptors and further recognition followed in 1969 when the first full-scale retrospective of his work was held at
The Minories in Colchester. However it was to be over forty years before the next major retrospective of his work was held, in 2015 at the
Pallant House Gallery. Underwood was married to Mary Coleman. They first met in 1911 at the Royal College of Art, married in 1917 and their first child was born in 1919. They had two sons, Garth (a zoologist) and John, and one daughter, Jean. ==Public commissions==