BROOK GREEN SCHOOL OF ART
In May 1919 George Claude Leon Underwood (25 December 1890–9 October 1975) purchased a studio at 12 Girdlers Road, Hammersmith and Underwood's Brook Green School of Art was formally established at his Girdlers Road studio in 1921. But it really came into its own on Underwood's resignation from the Royal College of Art in 1923, when Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986) and others persuaded him to carry on giving them life-drawing lessons in the evenings. This small and select roster of artists who were to become students at the Brook Green School of Art which included Eileen Forrester Agar (1899-1991), Raymond James Coxon (1896-1997), Mary Elizabeth Groom, Anna Bertha Hermes (1901-1983), Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton, Roland Vivian Pitchforth (1895-1982), Gertrude Nora Spicer Unwin (1907-1982), and Margaret Bruce Wells. By 1923 he had installed an etching press and embarked on two years of constant activity in printmaking as well as his normal subjects. By 1925 Underwood moved to New York City where he brought his School of Art to Greenwich Village and became active in the local wood engraving network. He supported his art with commercial jobs illustrating books and magazines while exhibiting his prints. In 1931 Underwood and Joseph Bard, a Hungarian poet and an expatriate in Britain, co-founded 'The Island', a journal of art and literature and he reformed the Brook Green School of Art which closed in 1938. Underwood continued to travel, visiting West Africa in 1945 and returning with a large collection of African art, some of which he later sold to the British Museum.