Hyde Park (c.1900)

Reginald (Rex) Vicat Cole was the son of the artist George Vicat Cole. He began to exhibit in London in the 1890s and was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1900. He taught at King’s College London with Byam Shaw and together they opened their own establishment, the Byam Shaw and Vicat Cole School of Art in Camden Street, Kensington in 1910. Cole was especially known for his paintings of trees. He wrote and illustrated a book on British Trees (1907), and another on how to depict trees in art, The Artistic Anatomy of Trees, published in 1915. He held a one-man show London Old and New at Robert Dunthorne’s Gallery, Vigo Street, London, in 1935 and planned a book The Streets of London which was never published. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere and collapsed and died in 1940 in Sussex whilst helping to rescue a family whose car had become stranded in flood water.