Edward Enoch Anderson (1878-1961)

Edward Enoch Anderson was born in Ruswarp near Whitby on the 14th December 1878, the son of noted Whitby gallery owner Edward Edgar Anderson, proprietor of the Rembrandt, West Cliff, and Anderson Galleries. Clearly born into an artistic family, not to mention a large family - Anderson had three brothers and seven sisters - he won a North Riding County Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in 1899. By 1903 he had been elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, and two years later he won first prize in a national competition organised by Connoisseur magazine.

The next year, in 1906, Enoch Anderson was appointed Art Master at Halifax Grammar School; he would continue to fill various teaching positions across the country, twice being Headmaster, until his retirement in 1946. Anderson divided his time between teaching and painting professionally; an active member of both The Staithes Group and the Northern British Academy of Art, the fourth exhibition of the Staithes Art Club was held in his studio at Well Close Square in Whitby, the first time the Group exhibited outside of Staithes. Edward Anderson died at his home in Brighton on the 3rd November 1961, a month before his eighty-third birthday.