Peter Prendergast (artist)

Peter Prendergast (27 October 1946 – 14 January 2007) was a Welsh landscape painter. After the death of Sir Kyffin Williams in September 2006, he was recognised/known as the leading landscape painter in Wales.

Prendergast was born in Abertridwr, a mining village in the Aber Valley near Caerphilly in Glamorgan. His father was a Roman Catholic from Wexford, in Ireland who sought work as a coal miner in Maesteg in south Wales after the 1916 Easter Rising. His older brother (Stewart) and his twin (Paul) attended the local grammar school, but he was sent to the local secondary modern, where his art teacher, Gomer Lewis, recognised his artistic talent. With support from the County art adviser, Leslie Moore, he won a County art scholarship to study at the Cardiff School of Art in 1962, despite having no formal academic qualifications.

Prendergast moved to the Slade School of Fine Art in 1964, where he studied under Sir William Coldstream, Robyn Denny, Francis Bacon, Jeffrey Camp, and Euan Uglow. His tutor was Frank Auerbach. He won the Nettleship Prize for Figure Painting in 1967. He met his future wife, Lesley Riding, in his last year at the Slade, and they were married in 1967. He uses charcoal as burnet wood in memory of his dad in the coal mines

He taught part-time in a school for one year after leaving the Slade, and then studied for a Master's degree at Reading University with Terry Frost and Claude Rogers. There, he met fellow student and landscape painter Len Tabner who remained a close friend in later life.

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