Biographies

Harry Becker (1865 – 1928)

Our information comes from, Harry Becker by David Thomson (Ipswich Borough Council, 1993):

He was born in 1865 at Colchester, Essex, the son of a German doctor. He studied in Antwerp under Charles Verlat and in the atelier of Carolus Duran in Paris. He began exhibiting with the Royal Academy in 1886, after his return to Colchester. From the early 1890s until 1912 Becker lived in London, marrying Georgina Waddington and having a daughter, Janet. In 1912 they moved permanently to Suffolk, living at first at Wenhaston and later at Darsham. Although Becker exhibited successfully, he avoided the professional art world and was little known. He worked out in the open, sometimes on huge lithographs, recording the experience of Suffolk farm work and livestock just before mechanisation. At his death in 1928 he left behind several hundredweight of previously unseen drawings, paintings and prints and a local reputation as a “shy outsider of uncompromising principle”.