Joseph Milner Kite (1862-1946)

Joseph Milner Kite (1862-1946). Milner Kite was a painter in oils and watercolours of portraits, figures and landscape. He was born in Taunton, Devon, his father a chemist. He initially worked in a London studio under William P Frith, before leaving England to study in Antwerp in 1881. In 1883 he continued his studies at the Academie Julian in Paris, under Bouguereau and Laurens. He visited Normandy and Pont Aven with the Irish painter Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940). In 1891 he returned to the Academie Julian to study under Lefebvre and Benjamin Constant. From 1900 he regularly spent the winter in Concarneau, Brittany, and visited the artist colonies in Cornwall.  A series of paintings of children on beaches are taken to be indicative of time spent in the West Country. Between 1886 and 1908 he exhibited widely at the RA, RBA, RBSA, Liverpool, Manchester and the Paris Salon amongst other places where he worked.  He is known to have painted in St Ives, Cornwall, Pont Aven, Concarneau, Grez-sur-Loing, Morocco, Spain and the USA where he exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (1905). Milner Kite died on 5 July 1945, having survived two world wars, at Millau, Aveyron, South of France at the age of 82. The Milner Kite Scholarship, set up posthumously by his brother and shared between the Royal College of Art and the Slade School, enables one student each summer to study in France.