Raymond Spurrier was born in 1920. He left school at 16 to enter the drawing office of the local borough surveyor where he learned to become the ‘neat and expeditious draughtsman’ required of engineering students. After the war he came to London to train and practise as a chartered town planner and, in the evenings, pursued an intermittent art training at St Martin’s School of Art and then at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In his spare time he made drawings for magazines and advertising.

As a writer he was a frequent contributor in the 1950s and 1960s to the Times Literary Supplement and the Architectural Review, and for seven years wrote a regular column for another, now defunct, architectural monthly. He also wrote for such publications as Illustrated London News, Heritage, Period Home and Watercolours and Drawings. From 1982 until his death in 1996 he was a regular and popular contributor to The Artist magazine with news, reviews, comment and feature articles. He also contributed to several art instructional books and wrote Sketching with Raymond Spurrier (Collins, 1989) and was co-author of Mastering Watercolour (Batsford, 1994).

As an artist Raymond worked mainly in watercolour but also enjoyed print making. He exhibited regularly with the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and the Royal West of England Academy, as well as from time to time in private galleries. He was Honorary Secretary of the R.I. and was twice a finalist in the Hunting Group annual art competition and in 1984 won the Winsor and Newton 150th Anniversary Award for the most outstanding group of paintings in that year’s Royal Institute show. Raymond also served on the Board of Governors of the Federation of British Artists.

His favourite subjects were landscapes and townscapes and he enjoyed travelling in search of places to draw and paint. His background as a town planner often influenced the abstract way in which he interpreted his subjects with a strong sense of pattern and design. The importance of the individual style of his work was recognised by the V&A in 2017 when the British watercolour collection acquired five of his paintings. His work is also represented in the Government Art Collection and many private collections. Some of the pictures held by the GAC have recently been hanging in the Cabinet Office and the British Embassy in Budapest.

The ’Recording Britain’ collection at the V&A, the brainchild of Sir Kenneth Clark, was an extension of the Official War Artist scheme and contains works by many influential artists such as Rowland Hilder and John Piper and the war artists included such illustrious names as Anthony Gross, Graham Sutherland, Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden all of whom have influenced Raymond’s own work. When his pictures were likened at the V&A to others in the museum’s ‘Recording Britain’ collection it recognised the influences that these contemporary artists have had on his own unique style.

In an obituary which appeared in The Artist in March 1997, Ronald Maddox PPRI RBA PS paid tribute to Raymond as a longstanding friend and fellow artist.