Herbert Arnould Olivier

Herbert Arnould Olivier, R.I. (9 September 1861 – 2 March 1952), was a British artist, best known for his portrait and landscape paintings. He was an uncle of Laurence Olivier.

Olivier exhibited extensively, including the Royal Academy starting in 1883, the R. P., the R. I. and the Paris Salon. He taught at the Bombay School of Art in the 1880s. He went to Kashmir with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught in 1884. In 1885 he showed 66 of the paintings from his trip to Kashmir at the Fine Art Society. These works were considered “effective, though hard and coarse in colour” by critics. He had a one-man exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1908.

In 1917, Olivier was appointed an official War Artist and in 1924 he presented to the nation, for display in ‘the new War Museum at South Kensington’, a number of paintings, including The Supreme War Council (the original of which was given to the French Government and displayed in the Palace of Versailles), The Armistice Meeting, The Military Representatives in Conference, The Peace Signature Table, and various portraits. The paintings now form part of the collections of the Imperial War Museum. Olivier was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887 and to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1929 where a major retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1935.