Cyril Edward Power R.A.

Cyril Power was the eldest son of an architect, born in London into a family who encouraged his creative abilities in music and in particular drawing.
Power studied architecture and joined his father's practice.
His natural talent earned him the 1900 Sloan Medallion, awarded by the Royal Institute for Architecture,(RIBA) for his design for an art school.
Cyril Power married Dorothy Mary Nunn in 1904, with whom he had four children.

During his only absence from London, a brief time spent in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Power met and began a lifelong collaboration with friend and fellow artist, Sybil Andrews.
After moving back to London in 1925, they founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Claude Flight and Iain McNab. Power became the principle lecturer, teaching, in particular, on structure and form in buildings, historical ornament and on architectural style. It was during this time that he began to study lino cutting under Claude Flight.
The work that resulted attracted worldwide interest.

June 1929 saw the 'First Exhibition of British Lino cuts' at the Redfern Gallery, London.
Subsequently a series of annual exhibitions were held at both the Redfern and the Ward galleries, generating considerable interest and commisions from the London Tourist Board for a series of prints on the theme 'sporting venues reached by the Underground'. Power's subjects continued to focus on elements of architecture, but with commissioned work on sporting venues, themes of speed and movement, always placed in the urban environment.
All these elements are combined to produce his best works, 'The Sunshine Roof' and 'Tube Station'.

Cyril Power continued after World War Two, to teach and to paint, principally in oils producing some ninety two paintings in the last year of his life.
He died in London aged 79.

Cyril Power's works are held in the permanent collections of
The British Museum, London,
The London Transport Museum.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Huntarian Art gallery, Glasgow.
The National Art Gallery, New Zealand.
Auckland City Art Gallery, Austrailia.

The work of Cyril Power features strongly in the new book, British Prints from the Machine Age. The book illustrates the dramatic change in printmaking technique in the years leading up to the Second World War, and the influence Italian Futurism had on this dynamic group of Artists.