Christopher Cavania Sanders was selected as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts on April 24, 1953, elected as a Royal Academician on 21 February 2 1961, and became a Senior Academician on January 1, 1981. He exhibited frequently and regularly at the Royal Academy from 1933 onwards and also became a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1962. In 1955 he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon.
Sanders was born on 25 December 1905 in Hall Green, a small village near Wakefield, Yorkshire. He studied at the Wakefield School of Art (1922-4), Leeds School of Art (1924-6) and the Royal College of Art (1926-9). He initially earned his living as a commercial artist, designing the Bird’s Custard label and patterns for upholstery in the London underground as well as illustrating several of the Janet and John books and Aesop’s Fables for Nisbet & Co.
Sanders taught for several years at the Harrow School of Art where he was Head of Painting and St. Alban’s School of Art. However, it is as a landscape painter and portraitist that he is best known, particularly his detailed depictions of grasses, foliage and flowers. He showed regularly in Britain and had successful exhibitions of his work in New York.
Christopher Sanders died on 7 August 7 1991. His obituary in The Daily Telegraph noted that “Sanders’s work proved popular and accessible from the beginning of his career” and he “produced paintings that were always intensely personal in feeling and passionate in their view of the natural world”.
