page_title: Rodrigo Moynihan
section_title: Postwar career
hierarchical_section_title: Rodrigo Moynihan / Postwar career
caption_attribution_description: English: Ats at work image: An ATS girl in dungarees and headscarf painting a wheel. Another attends an artillery piece in the right background
context_page_description: Rodrigo Moynihan RA was an English painter, credited with being a pioneer of abstract painting in England.
context_section_description: After the war, he was professor of painting at the Royal College of Art 1948–1957, and was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1954. At this period, he was in demand for official portraits, and executed commissions of amongst others Princess Elizabeth (1946) and Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1947). He changed direction from 1957, resigning from the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy and returning to abstraction, working outside England in Europe and North America.
  From 1971 onwards he was inspired to return to figurative painting in the form of large-scale studio still-lives, unordered, unarranged and apparently random. One of these such paintings was, The shelf, objects and shadows - front view (1982–83). This return to figuration also drew him to move back towards portraiture – with portraits of friends leading to renewed commissions by the end of the 1970s. Notable portraits of this period include Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1983–85; National Portrait Gallery, London) and Dame Peggy Ashcroft (1984; National Portrait Gallery).
caption: ATS at Work, (1943)
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