Artist Info
John Goodchild
John Charles Goodchild (1898 –1980) was a painter and art educator in South Australia.
He was born in London, but the family emigrated to South Australia in 1913. He served as a stretcher bearer with the 9th Field Ambulance in France, where he was wounded in 1918.
After the war he was commissioned by the Australian Government to produce a series of thirty six pen drawings of war graves for the book Where Australians Rest, published in Melbourne 1920. He studied at the Central School of Arts & Crafts, London, in 1921 before returning to Adelaide, where he produced a book of drawings of Adelaide landmarks and taught etching at the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1923 he held a one-man exhibition of his etchings in Adelaide and participated in an exhibition in Sydney.
In 1926 he married fellow South Australian artist Doreen Rowley. They had both studied at the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London.
In 1929 they established a studio in Adelaide and John began exhibiting his water colours with the South Australian Society of Arts of which he was a prominent member and its president 1937-1940. Around 1935 he and F. Millward Grey were commissioned by the South Australian Tourist Bureau to produce a series of posters which were extensively used on railway station billboards and elsewhere.
Goodchild was a board-member (1938-53 and 1960-69) of the Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery (from 1940 National Gallery of South Australia) and principal (1941-45) of the School of Arts and Crafts. In March 1945 the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, commissioned him as an official war artist. Attached to the Royal Australian Air Force, he painted several water colours which are compositionally dramatic, particularly 'Oxfords at 3000 feet over Strathbogie Ranges, Victoria'. On 2 September he was present at, and took a cinefilm of, the signing of the Japanese surrender aboard the American battleship, Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. In 1946 he was cartoonist for the Adelaide News.
