On 2 June 1953, the artist Fred Cuming, who has died aged 92, stood on the roof of the Old Admiralty Building in London sketching the coronation procession as it passed down Whitehall. “I got a very nice write-up for that painting,” he mused in an interview nearly 70 years later. He ascribed the success to two things: first, he had turned down the offer from newsmen also standing on the roof of photographs to work from – “They always promised they’d give you snaps, but they never did” – relying instead on his sketchbook. Second was the weather. As Cuming recalled of that long ago June day, it had been “pissing down with rain”.
This taste for the wet was to be bolstered by foreign travel. After four years at Sidcup School of Art and then national service, Cuming went to the Royal College of Art in 1951. While there, he won a scholarship to the British School at Rome. For a boy raised in the drab Kentish outskirts of London, the warm south came as a revelation. But Rome also presented Cuming with a problem. “If you painted the sky one day, it was still there the next,” he complained.
