Background
Gentleman was born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, in 1892. In April 1901, when Tom was nine, his father died following surgery.
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Tom Gentleman
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Education
At the age of 13, although already apprenticed as a draper and expected to go into the family business, he began evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming in 1911 a full-time student until in 1914 he was mobilised.
Career
Early
Gentleman received his diploma from the Glasgow School of Art in 1914, after becoming a full time student in 1911. He was awarded the Haldane Travelling Scholarship, but the outbreak of war in Europe meant that the trip had to be postponed until 1920-1921. During the trip he visited Corsica, Italy, France and Spain.
Other recipients of the Haldane Travelling Scholarship include Alexander Proudfoot (1908), and Loris Ray (1926).
In 1912, Gentleman had begun to volunteer with the Queen"s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry. Consequently, he was mobilised for service in August 1914, until his eventual demobilisation in 1918, after which he returned to Glasgow School of Art, and continued to take classes in painting and drawing.
He served with both the Scottish Rifles and the Glasgow Yeomanry. Gentleman worked as a painter, printmaker, cartoonist and freelance graphic designer from 1921, periodically exhibiting his paintings.
After they moved to Hertford in 1930 they had two sons, David (born in 1930) and Hugh (born in 1935).
Gentleman worked in several advertising agencies and from 1932 in the design studio at Shell Mexico During the 1939-1945 war he worked for several years for the Ministry of Information and then as a freelance, during which time he wrote and illustrated a children"s book called Brae Farm, a memoir of his Scottish childhood, which was published in 1945. His best known works are his lithograph The Grey Horses, published by School Prints in 1946, and two earlier posters for Shell.
After the war he returned to Shell Mex as its Studio Manager.
He was elected Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists in 1947. In 1952 he retired, and in 1956 moved with Winifred to Essex, where he went on drawing and painting for the rest of his life.
Tom and Winifred Gentleman died in 1966. Tom Gentleman is listed on the Glasgow School of Art"s First World War Roll of Honour.
