A very well executed portrait of a gentleman called Roger Woddis esq. by the very well known portrait artist Derek Chittock. Framed oil on board.
 
Born in 1922, Chittock studied at the Slade School of Art
(1942-1947) and the Royal Academy of Arts, where his teachers were British painter and etcher Randolph Schwabe and painter Philip Connard, respectively. Near the end of World War II, the young artist was commissioned to paint two portraits of Admiralty subjects by the War Artists' Advisory Committee. He later became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and worked as an art critic for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker. He resigned from his communist activities after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Chittock was on the selection committee of the London-based Artists' International Association for their 'Artists for Peace' series of exhibitions. Under the pen name James Dudley, he painted humorous covers of British post-war life for the news magazine John Bull, inspired by Norman Rockwell's sentimental drawings in the Saturday Evening Post in the USA. Some of these drawings have also appeared on the cover of the Dutch magazine Panorama.
 
Later in life, Derek Chittock was the author of the guidebook
'Portrait Painting Techniques (1979) for Larousse & Company
He passed away in 1986.