page_title: John Crosfield
section_title: Painting
hierarchical_section_title: John Crosfield / Personal life / Painting
caption_attribution_description: English: This painting was derived from a black and white print of of a 10,000 magnification of an ammonium carbonate crystal under an electron microscope. It is painted in oil on canvas.
context_page_description: John Fothergill Crosfield CBE DSc MA, inventor and entrepreneur, was a pioneer in the application of electronics to all aspects of colour printing and the inventor of the acoustic and subsonic mines during the Second World War.
  Graduating with a degree in mechanical sciences from Cambridge University in 1936, Crosfield was working on electrical lifts for ASEA in Sweden when war was declared. He joined the Admiralty, where with a team of mathematicians and engineers he was charged with developing sonar, to detect midget submarines, and new types of mines.
  In 1947, Crosfield founded J F Crosfield Ltd. to develop press control equipment, beginning with the Autotron, that enabled magazines to print economically in colour. Following this, the company played a leading role in the introduction of colour scanning in 1958, phototypesetting and later the automated composition of pages incorporating pictures and text, a 1970s precursor to Photoshop. He founded Crosfield Business Machines Ltd in 1966 to develop and produce banknote inspection, counting and sorting machines. The companies won 4 Queens Awards for Technology and Exports. De La Rue acquired the Crosfield businesses in 1975.
context_section_description: Crosfield's youthful oil paintings showed promise. His interest in art was awakened by Maurice "Grassy" Field, his art master at the Downs School, when he was 11. By the age of 15 (around 1930) his landscape oils show the influence of Impressionism. His father, himself an amateur painter, thought that his artistic talent and interest in engineering would best be served in architecture.  Marriage, the war, starting his own business and his growing family left little time for painting, but when he returned to it seriously, his art reflected the change in artistic values. He was very interested in the development of abstract art and a frequent visitor to galleries. He had seen a scanning electron microscope in a Helsinki research institute and, in 1975, when he had the money and the time to use it, he bought one from Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company.
  Crosfield was to be seen in his painter's smock at the top of Grove Lodge (his birthplace, which he had bought in 1965) preparing, scanning and photographing minute objects - insect parts, pollen, petals, crystals - that he subsequently reproduced in colour and in a much larger scale on canvas. Viewing nature magnified thousands of times "was like opening a door onto another planet." Though he sponsored an exhibition at a West End gallery, he did not receive the recognition he hoped for, and he abandoned the subject but not painting itself. He continued to paint landscapes, drawn from his extensive travels, and portraits, mainly for the family, until he packed up his paint box for the last time in April 2007, at the age of 91. Though these later paintings demonstrated his technical skill and, given that he projected slides onto his canvas, were very realistic, they did not show the feel for his subjects that he had demonstrated as a boy nor the originality of the sometimes surreal paintings based on what he saw through the viewfinder of the electron microscope.
caption: Ammonium Carbonate Crystal X 10,000 by John Crosfield, 1980. Oil on canvas
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