Nevill Johnson, who has died in London, was the last of a distinguished generation of Irish painters associated indelibly with the Victor Waddington Galleries in Dublin and with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art - both institutions which have vanished and passed into history. What set him apart from his Irish contemporaries, however, was the fact that he was English in origin. He was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, in 1911. His early years show no obvious leanings towards art or literature, and when he left school he took up a business career. This seems to have been mainly responsible for bringing him, in 1934, to Belfast, where he decided to settle.
He became friendly with the artist John Luke, a rather isolated and original figure, who appears to have introduced him to painting and gave him his first lessons in painterly technique. Together they visited Paris in the mid1930s, where he saw his first Cubist pictures. It was a style which deeply influenced him to the end of his career, together with Surrealism. Altogether, he lived in Belfast for 14 years. A turning point in his career came in the years just after the second World War, when he met the famous Dublin-based dealer and gallery-owner, Victor Waddington, who almost single-handedly was responsible for making Modernism acceptable - and saleable - to the largely provincial or unformed tastes of contemporary Irish art-lovers.
Waddington built up a "stable" of gifted Irish painters, several of them Northerners including Daniel O'Neill, Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton and George Campbell. These men were all known personally to Nevill Johnson, and when Waddington offered him a gallery contract he accepted and turned to painting full-time.
He had already shown his work in Belfast, but his one-man exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in Dublin in 1946 put him firmly on the map. He showed regularly at the same gallery between 1948 and 1955, and he also exhibited regularly at the annual Irish Exhibition of Living Art, until the late 1950s. He was represented in a touring exhibition of six Irish painters in America in 1953, in the exhibition "Fifty Years of Irish Painting" at the Municipal Gallery Dublin (not yet called the Hugh Lane Gallery) and at a group show of Irish art in Amsterdam. By this time, he had settled firmly in Dublin. By the late 1950s Nevill Johnson was established as one of Ireland's leading Modernist painters, but he began to go through what Brian S. Kennedy has called "a period of intense self-doubt."
He did not exhibit again at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art until 1966 and by then was already half-forgotten in Dublin, where in any case the impact of contemporary American art had brought about a complete turnover in taste.
He is listed as having a one-man exhibition at Washington DC in 1964; he appears to have shown in Dublin at the now-vanished Dawson Gallery, and in the early 1970s he had two exhibitions at London galleries. He also won a silver medal at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1978. However, it was not until 1979 that the Tom Caldwell Gallery (now vanished) reintroduced him to Dublin as an artist. He had a succession of one-man shows there and in 1955 had another at the Solomon Gallery. This was opened by his long-time friend, Prof Eoin O'Brien.
The review of this event in The Irish Times noted that Nevill Johnson had remained true to his Cubist and Picassoist allegiances.
In his later years, he lived mostly in London. His valuable, and highly individual, contribution to Irish art of the 1940s and 1950s is generally recognised, although he never won wide popularity.
Partly this was due to his rather retiring life-style and personality, but his cool, precise, elegant, sometimes cerebral style did not appeal to art-lovers as immediately as the work of some of his contemporaries did. He was a fastidious technician, a fine draughtsman and a skilful, muted colourist, but to the end there was something almost hermetic in his mentality. A cultured and intelligent man, he had esoteric interests such as Zen Buddhism and in his last years appears to have lived very privately. He put much effort and time into a book of photographs, showing Dublin in the 1950s, which should rank as a classic of its kind. Published in 1980 by Academy Press, Dublin, it was entitled Dublin: The People's City. This won an award at the Leipzig International Book Art Fair. He also, in 1983, published an idiosyncratic autobiography entitled The Other Side of Six.
He is survived by his son, Galway Johnson.
Nevill Johnson: born 1911; died August, 1999