My father-in-law, Robin Bateman, who has died aged 90, was a career librarian, a wine-maker, traveller, and avid reader and conversationalist. Above all else, though, he was a painter.
Although he produced innumerable landscapes, it was his paintings of groups of people that were most innovative and interesting. His palette range suited his various subjects well – yellows predominating in beach scenes, the shadows of tweed and corduroy in interiors, the light pastels of summer for the outdoors art exhibition as subject. His paintings had a frankness and directness that was very much part of the man, but sometimes not readily seen under his easy, jocular charm. His figures – often his family – were real flesh and blood, but at the same time they held a sort of cartoon quality.
While in the depiction of physical spaces and in objects, perspective was rigorously observed, these family scenes were painted with rules of number, space and time deliberately broken. The cartoonist in him adjusted physical size like a medieval painter, enlarging what took his fancy – an interesting head, a hairstyle or skirt pattern.
These family scenes were fairly statically presented, like an informal team photograph, as were the outdoors scenes. But outside, on the beach or at an open-air art exhibition, Robin gave rein to his extraordinarily powerful sense of people's active postures: how the shoulder of an artist drops as he applies paint to canvas in the open air, how lovers, lying on the beach embracing, arch their backs to bring their lips together.
Robin was born in Branscombe, Devon. His father was an opera singer and, later, a journalist; his mother was politically active, opening her home in the 1930s to Spanish, Jewish and Czech refugees and helping to run the local Anglo-Soviet Society in Teddington, Middlesex, from 1939 to 1945. His uncle was the painter James Bateman.
He left school in 1942 and served in the Royal Artillery during the second world war. At the age of 17, he met Millicent at Twickenham public library, where they were both working. They married in 1945. They had four sons, Stephen, Ralph, Justin and Gavin, and two daughters, Kate and my wife, Deborah. The family lived first in Twickenham after the war and then moved to Leeds, where Robin lived for the rest of his life.
Robin had spent several years caring for Millicent before her death, and soon after that was predeceased by Kate. But he spent the last few years of his life as if he had tapped in to some energy source: visiting, travelling, painting, writing, teaching, gardening, making wine and reading. Even after his 90th birthday, he did his daily 30 star jumps, walked miles and vaulted the odd five-bar gate.
He is survived by five children, 25 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
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