LUBBOCK, Joseph

1915 - 2019

Joseph Guy Lubbock was born at Chelsea, London on 20 May 1915, son of Major Guy Lubbock (9 October 1870-3 March 1956), an army officer, and his wife Lettice Isabella née Mason (21 June 1879-13 April 1980), who married at All Saints' Church, Necton, Swaffham, Norfolk on 16 April 1912 and in 1939 were living at Glebe House, Westerham, Sevenoaks, Kent. Joseph read engineering at Cambridge, before working on early examples of computers and during the Second World War, helped assemble the Spitfire and, with Sir Barnes Wallis (1887-1979), the Wellington bomber. He also served with the Royal Engineers as a bomb disposal expert and helped develop a range finder that could detect bombers overhead and guide missiles to explode on impact. He married at Bawdeswell Church, Norfolk on 28 April 1941, Ruth Cecilia Gurney (30 May 1917-18 November 2017), who in 1939 was living at 13 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich. Shortly after their marriage Joe was posted to the Far East. In the early 1960s Joseph turned his full attention to painting and writing and he and his wife moved to Suffolk in 1963. Joe was also an accomplished sailor and enjoyed many successes in ocean racing with Uffa Fox (1898-1972) and once pipped the Duke of Edinburgh’s yacht to first place in his class at Cowes Week and has travelled widely including Antarctic, China, Chile and right down to the Beagle Channel in South America and to Mexico. His work drew on the beauty of the Suffolk landscape and his travels with his wife Ruth to remoter parts of the world, the Himalayas, Galápagos, and Antarctic, also had a major influence on his work. He was a distinguished artist, writer and innovator and published his fifteenth book, meticulously composed at his home near Woodbridge. His limited-edition hand-bound books of writings and original prints of the natural world are kept in the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and in the British Library and he had exclusive exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of East Anglia, as well as abroad with The Royal Library at Windsor Castle containing his work. In 2017 he and his wife were living at High Elms, School Road, Waldringfield, Woodbridge, Suffolk. The Woodbridge Deben branch of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies (NADFAS) hosted a special 100th birthday celebration, with a special lecture by Dr Christopher de Hamel of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on illuminated mediaeval manuscripts, which inspired the artist’s work. Joseph Guy Lubbock died on 22 January 2019, aged 103.
Website: http://www.jglubbock.co.uk

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Works by This Artist