Biography
Born in Vienna, Austria in 1922 to Jewish parents, Hans Schwarz’s early life was a tumultuous one. After he lost his mother when he was 12, he was forced to drop out of art school in Vienna due to the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Shortly after he departed Austria on the Kindertransport and moved to England- his father, however, was executed during the Holocaust in Auschwitz.
After being released from internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien in 1941, Schwarz entered the Birmingham College of Art, and after graduating worked in a commercial art studio until the end of the war, when he became a freelance commercial illustrator for nearly twenty years. In 1964, however, he instead decided to dedicate himself completely to his painting and sculpture, moving to Somerset in 1966 where he experimented more with landscapes, sculptures and watercolour artwork.
In 1981, this watercolour artwork won him the Hunting Art Prize, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s his work appeared in many successful exhibitions at large commercial galleries, such as at the Thackeray Gallery, the New Academy Gallery, and the Woodlands Art Gallery. Schwarz died in 2003 aged 80.