Francis Hamel (born 1963) is a British painter based in Oxford. He is known for landscapes and portraits.[1]
Hamel attended Summer Fields School in north Oxford and Marlborough College, and studied at the Ruskin School of Art (1982-1985) while a student of Magdalen College.
In a 1995 Sunday Times article Hamel was quoted as saying that only two others of his 30 contemporaries at the Ruskin School of Art were earning a living as professional painters, and that "the most important thing is just painting pictures all the time. It takes a terribly long time to get even half decent at it. There is also a measure of luck thrown in. At the moment people seem to want to buy the kind of pictures I'm painting."[2] He had sold more than a quarter of the works in his first one-man exhibition by the end of the private view.
Hamel's portrait of Brian Fall (2002) is in the collection of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.[3]
In 2008 he was commissioned to paint a large group of works for the refurbished Fortnum & Mason store in London.[4]
In 2015 and 2016 he painted a commissioned series of portraits of the 25 past holders of the University of Oxford's Cameron Mackintosh Professorship of Contemporary Theatre.[5] These were displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2019, causing some controversy as they included a portrait of Kevin Spacey who had held the chair in 2008.[6] [7]
Hamel's 2020 exhibition Painting the Yellow Mountain at the John Martin Gallery showed painting resulting from trips to China and Hong Kong in 2019.[8]
Hamel lives in a cottage in the grounds of Rousham House and during lockdown in 2020-2021 made a series of 80 paintings of the gardens while they were closed to the public.[9] These were exhibited at Rousham and at the John Martin Gallery in London in October and November 2021,[10] and published with essays by various writers as The Gardens at Rousham (Clearview, 2021:).[11]
In October 2021 Hamel appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity.[12]