Stephen Tennant

Stephen Tennant (1906–1987) was a British artist, illustrator, writer and aesthete whose drawings and watercolours form part of a highly personal imaginative world of sailors, flowers, theatrical figures, exotic places and literary fantasy. Although celebrated in his youth as one of the most flamboyant of the Bright Young Things, he remained seriously engaged with drawing and writing throughout his life.

Born into the Tennant family and brought up at Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1922. There he formed a close friendship with Rex Whistler, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for poetry, drawing and theatrical invention. He later became closely associated with Cecil Beaton and with the wider artistic and literary circle of 1920s London.

Tennant drew constantly. His works on paper combine elegant line, decorative colour and handwritten text, often blurring the distinction between illustration, private fantasy and finished work of art. Sailors, flowers, costumes, theatrical characters and imagined Mediterranean settings recur throughout, alongside witty designs for books and projects that were never realised. The Redfern Gallery holds works including A Myrtle for Dionysus, Mexico is my Destiny, Water Lilies and Lotus and The Art-Lover and how to evade him or her.

Literature was equally important to him. In 1925 he illustrated his mother Pamela Tennant’s A Vein in the Marble, and in 1938 published the illustrated Leaves from a Missionary’s Notebook. His most ambitious project was Lascar: A Story of the Maritime Boulevards, a novel which occupied him for decades but remained unfinished. Its drafts, drawings and accompanying designs became almost an artwork in themselves.

Tennant also travelled widely, and places such as Mexico, Hawaii and the Mediterranean entered both his writing and his art. A 1956 exhibition at Gallery One brought together drawings and designs alongside paintings inspired by Hawaii and Mexico, revealing the breadth of his visual interests.

His personal circle included writers and artists such as Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Willa Cather. Rather than separating art from life, Tennant treated clothes, interiors, correspondence, drawing and writing as parts of the same creative enterprise. His highly cultivated persona sometimes overshadowed the seriousness and persistence of this work.

Tennant held solo exhibitions at The Redfern Gallery, as well as at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York and, in 1976, Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. 

He died at Wilsford Manor in 1987. Interest in Tennant’s work and archives has continued to grow: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale presented Stephen Tennant: Work in Progress in 2014, examining the extraordinary relationship between his drawings, writing and unfinished literary projects.