Paul Lucien Dessau

On leaving school he joined a commercial art studio as an apprentice, mostly doing catalogue work for department stores.

In 1941, the Firemen Artist Group attracted some 64,000 people in a month to the first of twenty exhibitions they were to hold at the Cooling Galleries.

[7] Menace is a set of four canvases, now in the London Fire Brigade Museum, entitled Overture, Crescendo, Rallentando and Diminuendo, which show fire-fighters tackling a giant demonic fire figure which towers over them in the first canvas, Overture, but lies defeated in the final Diminuendo.

[8] Dessau also contributed illustrations to the 1942 NFS anthology Fire and Water, to the 1943 WAAC booklet Air Raids and to a 1943 book on firemen co-written by Stephen Spender.

[3] After the war Dessau, and his wife whom he had married in 1935, moved out of London and settled in the country, where he pursued a career as a successful portrait painter.