Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks (1862 to 1937) was a British surgeon who became a painter, draughtsman and caricaturist and one of the most influential art teachers of his generation. Born in Solihull into a family that owned a brass foundry in Birmingham, he studied medicine in Brighton and at the London Hospital, became house surgeon there under Sir Frederick Treves in 1886, was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1888 and taught anatomy at the London Hospital medical school from 1892. He studied art in the evenings, exhibited with the New English Art Club and taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, serving as Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930. In the First World War he returned to medicine, became a lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1916 and worked with Harold Gillies, making pastel drawings that recorded facial injury cases at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot and the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup.