William Crozier was a Scottish-born artist who gained recognition in the late 1950s as one of the most inventive British landscape painters the post-war period.  He divided his later life between Hampshire and West Cork, and was elected to Aosdána, the prestigious association of Irish artists, in 1982.

Born in Glasgow in 1930 to a Scottish mother and a Northern Irish father, he showed artistic promise from an early age and decided upon his career path while still in his teens.  His talent led him to Glasgow School of Art, where he studied between 1949 and 1953, and later to Paris and then Dublin for brief but formative periods.  Distancing himself from the growing vogue for American Abstraction, Crozier allied his work more closely with European painting and gave great significance to his six-month stay in Paris during the early 1950s, recalling that ‘to be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world.’  Upon returning from Paris, he moved to London where he began mixing in the artistic circles of Soho and exhibiting alongside the likes of Francis Bacon, David Hockey and Peter Blake. 

By 1958, Crozier had set up a studio in Pebmarsh, Essex, and quickly began to develop the distinctively expressive landscapes for which he would become known.  His deep, atmospheric colours and playful mark-making soon caught the attention of the Drian and Tooth galleries in London, and his work became a regular presence in both thereafter. 

Crozier became an Irish citizen in 1973, and by the 1980s he was spending protracted periods in West Cork, where he found a landscape with which he formed a profound connection.  The remainder of his time was spent in Hampshire, where he was Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art. 

Crozier died on 12^th July 2011.