The paintings of one artist under his own name, plus two assumed. From 'Dartmoor News' No. 64, January/February 2002

When she died in 1985, my grandmother left us a pair of tiny moorland paintings. About seven by four inches, they are delicately-painted gouaches of - we think - Hound Tor, set against a tranquil evening sky, with a rich foreground of heather and bracken, and in one the edge of a millpond flanked by reeds. We assumed they were painted early in the last century. However, neither one was signed. Taking them out of the frames, we found no name on the back, only what we assumed to be a couple of pencilled reference numbers.

For years, we wondered who the artist was. Then in October 2001 we visited a magnificent exhibition of Dartmoor paintings at the Tavistock Picture Framing Company. Most of them were by F.J. Widgery and R.D. Sherrin, but there were a few by two names new to us. One was Douglas Pinder, who had painted a couple of pleasant if not spectacular watercolours of Tavy Cleave and The Lyd. The other was Ben Graham, with four rather striking gouaches which we preferred to the Pinders. One was of the view near Dousland, another was of 'The Tors, Okehampton', another near Belstone, and the last the River Taw.

All four had close similarities of style to our two mystery pictures. In particular the treatment of heather, and the warm, delicate wash of light green and fawn-red brown in the foreground, caught our eye at once. Ben Graham, we were sure, was almost certainly our man - the artist who had painted our pictures as well.

I asked the gallery owner about this painter, and he told me that Douglas Pinder was the real name. He also worked under the name Ben Graham, and also occasionally A.P. Shepherd. It was fairly common practice for artists to have two or more aliases in those days, as it was a good way of circumventing exclusive contracts with a particular gallery, and also prudent policy vis-à-vis the taxman.

Checking later in a biographical dictionary, Douglas Houzen Pinder (1886-1949) was born at Lincoln, but his family moved to the south-west soon afterwards. His mother became a schoolteacher at Newquay, and as a young man he was articled to a local architect before he turned to painting full-time, influenced like so many of his contemporaries by Widgery. During the Great War he was a conscientious objector. After peace was declared he was sponsored to visit Egypt, stayed at Port Said for a while, and painted desert scenes. On return to England he settIed at Horrabridge, where he painted most of his moorland pictures under both names.

Around 1940 he moved to Newquay where he painted mainly sea scenes, some signed as Shepherd. So far we have yet to see any of the latter.