TFG Jones writes: Ernest Procter, painter and designer, came from a Northumberland family of Quakers, following his father as a pupil to Bootham Friends’ School at York. His father, Henry Richardson Procter, was a scientist and a specialist in the chemistry of leather who gained an international reputation, becoming a professor at Leeds University and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

     In 1907, Ernest joined the art colony at Newlyn and became a pupil at the Forbes’ School of Painting. In 1910 he spent a year studying at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris, and in 1912, he married the fellow painter, Dod Shaw, who had worked with him in both Newlyn and Paris. When the Great War broke out, Ernest volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and returned to France. In 1918, he and Dod came back to Newlyn and remained until they travelled to Burma to work together on the commission to decorate Rangoon’s Kokine Palace. By this time he had proved himself a prolific painter of portraits and landscapes, but he had also produced notable watercolours and drawings, particularly of his war experiences.

     During the 1920s Procter achieved more success with his portraits and also explored religious and allegorical subjects. Portraits of Sir Thomas Beecham and Frederick Delius were bought by the National Portrait Gallery, and he painted the allegorical The Zodiac (1925) that was to be bought posthumously by the Chantrey Bequest. He continued to show regularly at the Royal Academy, and produced religious paintings for three local churches, St Mary’s in Penzance (later destroyed by fire), and the parish churches of Newlyn and St Hilary. Through most of the 1920s he ran, with his colleague and celebrated Newlyn artist, Harold Harvey, an all-year-round painting school. And, always adventurous, in the early 1930s, he began to design glassware, furniture and carpets for industry. In 1934, he took up an appointment as Director of Studies in Design and Craft at the Glasgow School of Art.

A year later, this kindly, industrious and highly-principled man collapsed and died of a stroke in his native Tynemouth, when on a return trip from Newlyn to his work in Glasgow. He was 49.