Walter Westbrook (artist)
Walter Edward Westbrook (3 August 1921 – 15 January 2015) was a South African artist who lived latterly in Kent, England. He was well known particularly for his watercolour landscapes inspired by the arid plains of the Northern Cape and Namibia, and later by the countryside of Kent and the English Channel. Westbrook was born in Pretoria in 1921 and lived in Kimberley for several decades before emigrating to England in the late 1990s. He died in Kent in 2015, aged 93. Early years and wartime art Westbrook began to paint at a young age and studied art under Walter Battiss in Pretoria. Not recognised officially as war artist, Westbrook nevertheless practised as a painter throughout his war years in North Africa, and in Italy where he was taken under the wing of Italian artist, Francisco Caprioli. Wartime works of his are exhibited at the South African National Museum of Military History. In the post-war period, Westbrook held a one man show in Pretoria in 1947. Kimberley It was when living and working in Kimberley that he began to engage with the arid landscapes of the Northern Cape, the Kalahari and Namibia. He embarked on a full-time career as artist