Edwin G Lucas
British artist (1911-1990)
Edwin G Lucas (30 March 1911 – 9 December 1990) was a Scottish Modernist artist. He was an amateur, self-taught apart from evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art, but during the period 1939-1952 he produced Surrealist works that are said to be unprecedented in Scottish art of the period.
His work attracted little attention from the art world at the time, but it started receiving recognition following its "discovery" in 2013 by curators of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Early career
Edwin George Lucas was born in Leith in 1911, and grew up in Juniper Green, a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He was educated at Juniper Green Primary School and then George Heriot's School.
He was interested in a career in art, but his family discouraged this because his uncle, E G Handel Lucas, who is now a well regarded Victorian artist, struggled to make a decent living and lived the latter part of his life in poverty. Instead, Edwin joined the Civil Service in Edinburgh and studied at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a Bachelor of Law in 1934.
Throughout the 1930s he painted conventional, well executed landscapes. These were mainly watercolours, with a strong emphasis on the countryside close to the family home in Juniper Green. They were often accepted for exhibition by the Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) and the Royal Scottish Academy
One of these paintings attracted attention from the French journal La Revue Moderne des Arts et de la Vie.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18389440. VIAF identifies the subject as 315606981. The Library of Congress control number is no2015054963. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1990, 1939 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edwin G Lucas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.