Dennis Henry Osborne HRUA (23 December 1919 – 10 May 2016) was a British artist and teacher who worked mainly in oil and watercolour.
They spent six months on-the-run before being recaptured and transferred to a forced labour camp in Silesia, Poland, where they remained until their liberation by the American military in 1945.
[5] Osborne spent his spare time in captivity drawing pictures for his fellow prisoners and guards, earning small privileges, and rekindling his childhood love of art.
He used his bursary to attend classes at Heatherley School of Fine Art where he befriended the Canadian born painter James Le Jeune.
[13] The Art Gallery of Hamilton awarded Osborne a purchase prize at their 8th Annual Winter Exhibition in February 1957, for a portrait of his brother-in-law Jim.
[14] Osborne's Canadian sojourn included several two, and three-man exhibitions with his wife, and artists Walter Hickling[15] and David Partridge.
[16] Shortly before he returned to the UK Dennis accepted an invitation to show at the Twentieth Biennial International Water Colour Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1959.
[17] In Donegal Dennis and Jean found accommodation in the gate lodge of Glenveagh Castle which was owned by American art collector and millionaire Henry Plumer McIlhenny.
The Osbornes bought a property in the town when Dennis became Head of Art and Design at Lisnagarvey Boys County Secondary School where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1983.
Osborne later remarried a Lisburn woman named Maureen Wortley who was for a time a secretary at Lisnagarvey High School.
[26] He continued exhibiting in group shows, with the RUA, and the Royal Hibernian Academy and as part of the Queen's University Belfast International Arts Festival.
[32] A year later Osborne received the Blackstaff Press Award of £500 for an abstract oil painting of a linen sack at the 122nd Annual Exhibition.
[33] In 2008 Osborne showed with Bertie Higgins, Bernie Devlin, and Wendy Reeves in the Gillen Gallery on South Street, Newtownards, in what was to be his final exhibition.
Osborne experimented with many styles of painting, but he was undoubtedly influenced by the Euston Road School which emphasized naturalism, simplicity of form and realism.
He is known to have completed at least four murals, one in Milford Parochial Hall, County Donegal in 1951,[10] one for the Stewart & Hinan Corporation, one in the recreation room of John Pennachetti's, both in St Catharines, and another in a chiropractor's clinic in Welland, Ontario, in 1959.