Bliss, Douglas Percy - Derbyshire's Artistic Heritage
Douglas Percy Bliss - Derbyshire's Artistic Heritage
DOUGLAS PERCY BLISS (1900-84) was a painter, engraver, art critic and writer with long Derbyshire connections. Although celebrated - indeed rather revered - in the inner circles of art history, his name is not universally recognised in Derbyshire, but deserves to be.
Douglas Bliss was born in Karachi, India, on 28 January 1900. His father Joseph Bliss, an entrepreneur, had business interests there. Douglas was brought up and educated in Edinburgh and graduated from Edinburgh University in 1922. From 1922-25 he studied painting at The Royal College of Art in London, and his talent later flourished.
In 1928 he married fellow artist Phyliss Dodd (1899-1995). In 1940 his home in Blackheath, London, was severely damaged in a German bombing raid, which precipitated his 'evacuation' to Derbyshire. The Bliss family lived first at Shottle and in 1943 moved to 'Woodside Cottage' in Windley, which remained home base for over 40 years until Bliss's death in 1984.
He recorded many Derbyshire scenes on canvas, depicting the countryside as it was forty, fifty and sixty years ago - indeed as we will never see it again. Pictures such as 'The Village Shop, Turnditch' (1965), 'Hillside Farm, Hazelwood' (1956), and 'Sheaves at Ireton Wood' (1945) are all redolent of an increasingly bygone rural age. Nor did he confine himself to the countryside - works like 'A Derby Back Garden' (1933) recorded the urban scene before the planners and demolition men moved in.
In retirement he became a governor of Derby School of Art. Douglas Percy Bliss died on 11 March 1984, aged 84, a renowned artist of yesterday who Derbyshire can today be proud to call one of its own.
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