NON-EUROPEANS ONLY (Limited edition signed by the artist)

Thirty-Six Drawings.

36 black and white plates, wiro-bound with pictorial brown stiff card covers, a very good copy .

Limited edition of 350 copies. This copy is number 299.

Loosely inserted in a copy of the Catalogue of the Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Designs for the Theatre by John Dronsfield, April 1944. With an article reprinted from the South African Architectural Record, August 1943, by Denis Hatfield.

Born John Marsden Dronsfield, in Lancashire, England and studied briefly at Manchester Art School. Otherwise he was mainly self-taught. In 1918 he enlisted in Young Soldiers' Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment and was discharged in 1919 as physically unfit.

His stage design career began in 1923, with Sybil Thorndike and he then worked in London as a stage-designer and advertising artist for the next 16 years.

In 1939 he emigrated to settle in Cape Town, South Africa where he built a reputation as an imaginative stage-designer for ballet and straight drama, and continued working as author and graphic artist, with his first one-man art exhibition taking place in Cape Town in the very year of his arrival, followed inter alia by an Overseas Exhibition of South African Art, at the Tate Gallery(1948) and the Venice Biennale (1950). Two Memorial Exhibitions were held for him: South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town (1955) and the Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town (1967).

He and his partner, the arts critic and author Denis Hatfield, kept a kind of open house for artists and worked closely together in the 1940s, particularly on his publications. His published art work and poetry include: Non-Europeans Only : Thirty-six Drawings by John Dronsfield in 1942 The Work of John Dronsfield edited by Denis Hatfield (Johannesburg: SA Architectural Record, 1944); and posthumously, Satires and Verses by John Dronsfield, edited by Denis Hatfield Bullough (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1955) and two portfolios of reproductions of his graphic studies, entitled African Improvisations.

He was a member of the International Art Club, South Africa and his work is held by a large number of public art collections. Sadly he committed suicide in 1951. http://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/John_Dronsfield