Francis Hamel

Francis Hamel has built an international reputation for his landscape paintings, portraits as well as his finely structured compositions of trees and flowers. In 2019 the V&A held an exhibition of his portraits, ‘Behind the Curtain’, and in the same year a monograph was published. Born in 1963 and trained at The Ruskin School, Oxford Francis Hamel has lived and worked in a studio next to the reowned William Kent gardens at Rousham in Oxfordshire since 1997. The gardens and surrounding park have been a constant source of inspiration, evident not only in the paintings of his surroundings, monumental tree portraits in particular but from what he has learned about the connections that exist between gardens and the landscape in which they sit. This exploration has taken Hamel to Italy to paint the formal Italian gardens of Tuscany and Umbria, as well as the wilder landscapes of Le Marche. In 2021, prompted by lockdown, he made a collection of paintings of Rousham which coincided with publication of a second book 'The Gardens at Rousham'. Since then he has continued his painterly exploration of gardens travelling around Great Britain visiting and painting numerous public and private gardens, parks and allotments. Hamel’s work is held in public & private collections throughout the world including Fortnum & Mason, The Ashmolean Museum, St John’s College Oxford, Goldman Sachs, HRH King Charles III, Rolls Royce, The Victoria Palace Theatre, The Sondheim Theatre, Wyndham's Theatre, The Noel coward Theatre, The Prince of Wales Theatre, The Prince Edward Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall, Farrer and Co & Sir Cameron Mackintosh.