John Bensusan-Butt

John Gordon Bensusan-Butt (6 June 1911 – 22 August 1997) was an English landscape painter and author.

The son of Geoffrey C. Butt (later Bensusan-Butt) and his wife Ruth Bensusan, a physician, he was educated at Gresham's School, Magdalen College, Oxford, the Royal College of Art, and the Central School of Art and Crafts.^[1]

His aunt Esther Bensusan was the wife of Lucien Pissarro, son of Camille Pissarro, and Bensusan-Butt grew up with their work around him, at the Minories, Colchester, now a museum and art gallery. From 1935, Lucien Pissarro became his adviser and artistic mentor, and the two men worked together at Cotignac and at the Minories, where Pissarro often stayed.^[2] Bensusan-Butt exhibited at the Royal Academy^[1] and was the art critic of the Essex County Standard from 1950 to 1966.^[2]

He died in August 1997, while still living in Colchester.^[3]

Selected publications

• John Bensusan-Butt, Lucien Pissarro 1863-1944 (London: Anthony d’Offey, 1963)
• John Bensusan-Butt, The House That Boggis Built: a Social History of the Minories, Colchester (Victor Butte-Lay Trust, 1972)
• John Bensusan-Butt, The Eragny Press 1894–1914 (Colchester, 1973)
• John Bensusan-Butt, Recollections of Lucien Pissarro in his seventies (London: 1977)
• John Bensusan-Butt, On Naturalness in Art (1981) ISBN 978-0950746401
• John Bensusan-Butt, Colchester People: the John Bensusan Butt biographical dictionary of eighteenth-century Colchester