Charles Mozley

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Charles Alfred Mozley (29 May 1914 – 11 January 1991) was a British artist and teacher who produced paintings, book illustrations and many designs for book covers, posters and prints. He was born in Darnall, Sheffield, and as a schoolboy attended the Sheffield School of Art. An exhibition of his work was held in 1933 at the Hibbert Brothers Gallery. After teaching in Sheffield that year, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1934. He left the RCA in 1937 and then taught life drawing, anatomy and lithography at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts while also working as a freelance artist.

When World War II began, Mozley joined the British Army, working in military intelligence and on camouflage. In 1940 the War Artists' Advisory Committee bought his painting A Kentish Lane and granted him a wartime sketching permit to paint outdoors in London and Plymouth. The WAAC purchased another work from Mozley in 1944. He served in the Royal Engineers, finishing his service with the rank of Acting Lieutenant-Colonel.

After the war, Mozley became a busy commercial artist. He designed film posters for Alexander Korda, theatre posters for the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, and murals for the Festival of Britain. He created hundreds of book covers and illustrated books for the Limited Editions Club in New York, Chatto and Windus, and the Folio Society. He also did interior decoration, television adverts and press adverts for British European Airways, and made posters for the London Underground, Shell and Lyons tea-rooms.

Mozley held a retrospective in 1979 at the King Street Gallery in London. His Venice drawings were shown at Somerset House to support the Venice in Peril Fund. He married fellow artist Eileen Kohn in 1938; she died in 1989. They had five children. Mozley lived in Kew from 1971 until his death in 1991 from heart failure, aged 76.

Posthumous exhibitions of his work included a lithographic retrospective at the Barbican Centre library in 2002, a general overview at Grey College in Durham the same year, and another Barbican Centre exhibition three years later.