Biography
Alfred Henry Robinson Thornton (b. 1863 in Delhi, India - d. Painswick, Gloucestershire, UK 1939) was the son of a civil servant who was Chief Secretary to the Government of the Province in Delhi. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (graduated 1886). He served in the Foreign Office between 1888 and 1889 whilst also studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1888–9), before going to the Westminster School of Art (1890–2) under Fred Brown. He visited Le Pouldu, Brittany, with Arthur Studd in 1890 and met Paul Gauguin followed by another paionting trip in 1895 to La Roche Guyon with Roger Fry. Robinson returned briefly to the Slade in 1893 and became associated with Walter Sickert in running an art school between 1893–4, and with D. S. MacColl and Charles Conder. He lived in Bath between 1903-20. He contributed to The Yellow Book and was a member of the NEAC from 1895 and its Honorary Secretary from 1928 onwards. He also a member of The London Group from 1924; President of the Cheltenham Group in 1926. Thornton, a landscape painter, also collected modern French paintings, and his aesthetic theories were published in The Burlington Magazine in 1921. He wrote The Diary of an Art Student of the Nineties (1938). A memorial exhibition was held at The Redfern Gallery, London in 1939.
