James Bolivar Manson

[3] Although his art policies were more advanced than previously at the Tate and embraced Impressionism, he stopped short of accepting newer artistic movements like Surrealism and German Expressionism, thus earning the scorn of critics such as Douglas Cooper.

[6] At the age of 16, he left Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and, in the face of his father's opposition to painting as a career, became an office boy with the publisher George Newnes, and then a bank clerk, a job he loathed and lightened with bird imitations and practical jokes.

[7] He married Laugher and they moved to the Latin Quarter in Paris, renting a room for £1 a month and economising in a shared studio with Charles Polowetski, Bernard Gussow and Jacob Epstein, who became a lifelong friend and with whom he studied at the Académie Julian, still dominated by the Impressionists' enemy, Adolphe Bouguereau; occasionally Jean-Paul Laurens tutored.

[7] They lived in the top two floors of 184 Adelaide Road, Hampstead, where his wife gave music lessons at the front and Manson set up a studio at the rear, working out the family's tight budget on the kitchen wall much to her displeasure.

[7] Lilian succeeded Bernard Shaw's mother as music director at the North London Collegiate School for Girls; in 1910 The Times took notice of her revival of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, for which Manson designed and helped to make costumes.

[3] Manson is considered to have given Aitken a liking for French Impressionism and to have highlighted the Camden Town Group, even though its leader, Walter Sickert, was still outside the official canon.

[1] His reputation as an artist was primarily as a flower painter and art was his main ambition, but he was uncertain as to whether this would allow him to earn a full-time living—in 1928 he asked Roger Fry's advice on the matter.

"[2] His own artistic ambitions had not been fulfilled, he had an unhappy marriage and he drank to excess; he suffered from depression, blackouts and paranoia; and he had long periods off work sick.

[3] The same year, he and the Trustees rejected a donation of four William Coldstream paintings and two Henry Moore sculptures, and, in 1935, declined to buy Matisse's Interior with a Figure for £2000, turned down the loan of Picabia's Courtyard in France and also the offer of a gift of three Roger Fry oils.

[3] Manson preferred to put on a popular show of Cricket Pictures, coinciding with the 1934 Ashes tour, and in 1935 substituted an exhibition by Professor Tonks for a proposed Sickert retrospective.

[3] Towards the end of his term of office, Manson's life declined into alcoholism; he was drunk at Board meetings and on one occasion was wrapped in a blanket and carried out after he had fallen onto the floor.

[3] On 4 March 1938, Manson attended a dinner organised by Kenneth Clark at the Hotel George V in Paris to celebrate the British Exhibition taking place at the Louvre museum.

A number of sculptures, chosen by Marcel Duchamp and en route from Paris to Peggy Guggenheim's London gallery, had been held by customs officers, who needed to ascertain whether they were in fact art and thus exempt from duty.

"[3] In March and April 1946, a memorial show was held at the Wildenstein Gallery in London with 59 works in oil, watercolour, etchings, drawings and pastel, dating from 1903 to 1945.

[9] A major retrospective of the Camden Town Group was held at Tate Britain in 2008, but omitted eight of the 17 members, including Duncan Grant, James Dickson Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis and Manson, who was, according to Wendy Baron, of "too little individual character".