BERNARD SLEIGH

Bernard Sleigh was born in Birmingham and started his artistic career as an apprentice to a commercial process engraver. However, he attended evening classes at the Birmingham School of Art and soon abandoned his apprenticeship to make the woodcuts for Arthur Gaskin's illustrations to Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. He was then appointed as the engraving teacher at the School of Art, a post he held until 1937. He was in fact sacked at one point by Catterson Smith the director, but Gaskin intervened and insisted on his re-instatement. A member of the Birmingham Group - the arts and crafts conscious society of painters and designers that Burne-Jones so inspired with his visits to the city towards the end of his life - Sleigh became involved with the Town Hall Murals and various decorative schemes commissioned from local Guilds of Handicraft. He produced stained glass and occasional sculpture but is probably best known now for his woodcuts. Here he worked particularly for the Essex House press, cutting designs for William Strang and Charles Ricketts among others. His most original work is invariably associated with fairies, in whose existence he was firmly convinced and in his manuscript autobiography he attempts to prove this beyond all doubt. It is entitled rather tellingly "Memoirs of a Human Peter Pan." Whether the mescaline-type drug peyote with its hallucinogenic properties, which he used to take on account of an abscess in his inner ear was in any way responsible for his fairy visions is an interesting question. He was an occasional exhibitor at the Royal Academy. More usually he showed at the New Gallery and at the Royal Society of Birmingham Artists, where he was elected member in 1928.