# Eric Rimmington

Eric Oliver Rimmington (19 July 1926 – 3 November 2024) was an English painter of still lifes, landscapes and murals. He served in the military in the Second World War, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and taught art at various establishments in England and the United States. He exhibited his paintings at many venues, and has numerous works in public collections. He is best known for his mural in the Trafalgar public house, Portsmouth, which influenced English Heritage in listing the building.

## Background

Rimmington was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire. His father was Charlie Rimmington senior, an engine room artificer who served in the Royal Navy in the First World War, and his mother was seamstress Mabel Bowman. He was the youngest of three brothers. The eldest was Charlie Rimmington junior, of the Royal Navy, who was mentioned in dispatches in the 1944 Birthday Honours. The middle brother was Ronald N. Rimmington. Eric Rimmington was educated at Southern Secondary School for Boys and Southern Art College. However, before he could complete his studies, he was recruited as a cadet into the Dorset Regiment during the Second World War, serving in the Far East, and becoming second lieutenant on 14 October 1945. After the war, he completed his studies, and earned a fine art diploma in 1952 at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Rimmington married Margaret McVey in 1947 and they had a daughter, but the marriage ended in the 1960s or 1970s. While working at Wolverhampton he formed a partnership with Mary Michaels, a history of art teacher at the same establishment, and they married in 1994. He died on 3 November 2024.

## Career

Rimmington was a still life artist, and a draughtsman who used graphite and pencil. Art critic William Packer said that he was "one of our most distinguished exponents of still life". The Trafalgar public house, or the former Trafalgar House Services Club in Portsmouth, was Grade II listed in 2002 for its mural, executed between 1948 and 1949 by Rimmington when he was 23 years old. The mural covers the whole of one wall of a downstairs back room. The listing says:
   The principal interest of the building is a painted mural ... painted in 1948 by Eric Rimmington.The work is of considerable interest as an example of public mural painting of the immediate post-Second World War period, with its allusions to the War and local references to the naval base of Portsmouth, by an interesting young artist.
While continuing with his own painting, Rimmington was employed as an art teacher. He taught at Scarborough College of Art between 1952 and 1958, and at Bradford College of Art from 1958 to 1966. He was a senior lecturer in art between 1966 and 1969 at Birmingham College of Art and Design. He was then hired at Wolverhampton Polytechnic as senior course tutor and principal lecturer between 1969 and 1982. Around 1982–1983, he taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin–Stout in the United States. Mary Michaels said that in Winsconsin, "Eric found an atmosphere refreshingly free of the prescriptive attitudes that dominated the British art world". He returned to Worcester and then Hackney, and proceeded to work as a still life artist.

## Exhibitions

Over thirty years from the 1980s, Rimmington contributed to a large number of group exhibitions, and had thirty exhibitions of his own work. He exhibited at the Millinery Works, Islington, the Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, and the Mercury Gallery, Cork Street, London. The 2012 Millinery Works exhibition featured forty paintings of the London Underground, created between 2006 and 2011. In 2014 the Bohun Gallery featured an exhibition of Rimmington's still-lifes.

## Collections

Rimmington's works are held in a number of public collections, including the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Imperial War Museum, Bradford City Art Gallery, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Reading Museum and Art Gallery, the University of Leeds, Scarborough Art Gallery and the ING Collection in the Museum of London.