Kenneth Rowntree
British artist (1915-1997)
Kenneth Rowntree (14 March 1915 – 21 February 1997) was an English artist.
Career and life
Kenneth Rowntree was born in Scarborough, the son of Howard Doncaster Rowntree (1879-1974).
He was educated at Bootham School, York.
He studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford and went on to the Slade School of Fine Art.
At the Slade he met Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, moving to north Essex to work more closely with them.
They became known – with others – as the Great Bardfield Artists.
In 1939, he married architect Diana Rowntree (née Buckley) with whom he had two children.
During the Second World War, he worked for the War Artists' Advisory Committee.
He was one of more than 60 artists commissioned by the Government and financed by the Pilgrim Trust to record the face of England and Wales before development or wartime destruction changed it.
Recording Britain, as this project came to be known, covered a total of 36 counties.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kenneth Rowntree” as british artist (1915-1997). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british artist (1915-1997). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 Dec 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6390649. VIAF identifies the subject as 69857513. The Library of Congress control number is nr95033545. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1997, 1879 and 1974.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Kenneth Rowntree”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Kenneth Rowntree primary sources, Kenneth Rowntree archive and Kenneth research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenneth Rowntree” 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.