Pine Trees at Holkham Bay, Norfolk, c.1999
Michael Bennallack Hart (b.1948) is a contemporary British landscape painter whose work continues a tradition of countryside painting reaching back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when artists responded to growing urbanisation with a renewed appreciation of the rural landscape. Born in Sussex, he studied at Ravensbourne College of Art in London between 1966 and 1970, and his feeling for landscape was shaped early by a childhood spent in the Weald of Kent. He began his career designing and illustrating film posters and record sleeves before working through the 1970s and 1980s as an advertising art director and illustrator, winning numerous industry awards, all the while continuing to paint and exhibiting at the Spectrum Gallery in New York.
Since the 1990s Bennallack Hart has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in London and further afield, including Paris, Dublin and San Francisco, and his paintings are held in private, public and corporate collections across Europe, Australia and North America. His landscapes draw on extensive travel through the British Isles, Ireland, Europe and the United States, and he is a member of the Chelsea Arts Club. He lives and works in Richmond, Surrey.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings staged a solo exhibition of Bennallack Hart's work, Lyrical Landscapes, in May 2024, presenting a collection of evocative landscape paintings that reflected his ongoing engagement with the British and European countryside. The gallery's current holdings include views from Norfolk, Provence and Corsica, illustrating the geographical range of his practice and his continuing appeal to collectors drawn to contemporary landscape painting rooted in an earlier, plein-air tradition.