Oscar Leo Rawlings

Oscar Leo Rawlings (British, 1918–1990)

An elegant oil portrait of a polo player shown mounted on a high-stepping chestnut thoroughbred and silhouetted against a panoramic background of landscape and sky. An exceptional equestrian study by this notable British author, war artist and painter of steeplechasing and horse-racing scenes.

Oscar Leo Rawlings was born on 16 May 1918 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire. As a young boy, he won a scholarship to the Central School of Art, but after the early death of his mother, he withdrew at the school's request at the age of 13. The family moved to Blackpool, where Rawlings took evening classes in art. By the age of 17, he was running his own successful business as a scenic and display artist.

Leo Rawlings joined the Territorial Army and was posted to Singapore in 1941, where he was captured by the Japanese. He was able to draw accurately from memory, and was unofficially commissioned to keep a pictorial record of the POW experience. He completed over a hundred paintings and drawings, which were hidden in a stove-pipe buried under his bed. After the war he exhibited his art and lectured about his wartime experiences. In 1972 he self-published And the Dawn Came Up Like Thunder, an illustrated account of his experience as a prisoner of war.

In addition to a career as a celebrated war artist and successful equestrian painter, Rawlings also created a number of popular comic strips for DC Thomson's "The Victor" and "The Hornet" including "The Bubble", "The Army of the Shadows," and "Young Marvelman" (1956) as well as a number of Robin Hood stories for "Captain Miracle" (1961) and his prisoner-of-war series "Island of No Return" (1966).

Signed lower right recto

The Artists Bluebook, Dunbier, Lonnie Pierson, Editor, AskART Inc.

Alan Clark, Dictionary of British Comic Artists, Writers and Editors, The British Library, 1998, p. 141.

And the Dawn Came Up Like Thunder, Leo Rawlings Prisoner of Japan and War Artist, 1941-1943. Davenport's Art Reference, The Gold Edition, Davenport, Ray, 2005.