Ron King

1936 - 2003

Printmaker, painter and teacher, born in São Paulo, Brazil, who studied at Chelsea School of Art, 1951–5, and won a Biddulph Scholarship for Painting, a Monsanto Painting Award, 1957, and a Forrester Painting Award, 1960. King was art director for a publishing company in Canada, 1957–60, and lectured at Farnham School of Art, 1961–5. In the mid-1960s, King had many prints produced by Editions Alecto, notably The Prologue series based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Following Editions Alecto’s abandonment of The Prologue project, in 1967 King founded Circle Press, specialising in limited editions of fine books and prints. John Berger, Julia Farrer, Birgit Skiöld and Ian Tyson were some of the artists he worked with. The retrospective exhibition Cooking The Books: Ron King and the Circle Press, organised in 2002 by Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, America, celebrated the Center’s acquisition of a complete set of Circle Press works and an accompanying archive.