The conscientious painter
Percy Horton was a man of unwavering commitments – to his principles, to the working man, and to art.
The story of Britain’s war artists, so often told, is a narrative of witness. In it, the likes of Paul Nash, Percy Wyndham Lewis and CRW Nevinson in the First World War, and Henry Moore and Eric Ravilious in the Second donned uniform the better to show the many realities of conflict, at home and abroad. Percy Horton was born in 1897 and so reached conscriptable age in the middle of the First World War. He, however, refused even to put on army khaki and he suffered grievously for it.