Percy Shakespeare was an artist and teacher who was working in the School of Painting in the Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts in 1938-39.
Pamela Downing, aged 18, started a course at the School of Painting and was self evidently one of his pupils – probably in his ‘Life Drawing’ class. The attached sketch signed by Percy was kept by Pam in her large art folio. It would most likely have been drawn early in Pamela’s first full term in about Sept 1939. Percy was called up to the Royal Navy later in 1939 and was killed in an air raid in 1943.
Percy Shakespeare, Portrait of Pamela Downing, 1939