NEN Gallery

Doitch was born (illegiimately) in Vienna as Siegfried Steiner in 1923. At six months, he was adopted by his father and his wife, and took the family name Deutsch, which was anglicised into Doitch when he came to England. His father had turned from cabinet-making to tea-tasting, and was on a work trip in England when Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. He managed to acquire a domestic servant's visa for his wife to join him and Eric was allowed to come too. His older sister, Didi, escaped to Egypt, but also later made her way to England with a domestic's visa. At first, Eric was sent to work on a farm. From 1940 to 1941 he was interned as an alien on the Isle of Man. On his release, he worked in a munitions factory as a lathe turner until 1945, when he went to Camberwell School of Art.

After Camberwell, he studied printmaking part-time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, supporting himself with odd jobs. In 1951, he went to the Royal College of Art, where he met the artist Mary Fitzpayne, whom he married in 1954. He established a reputation as a teacher at Camberwell, the Guildhall, the City and Guilds School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. When he had time for his own work, Doitch painted small, intense scenes of post-war London – bomb sites around Camberwell, where he lived for 12 years from 1963, men on street corners, children playing in the street, burned-out cars and fairground scenes. He also painted specifically Jewish pictures, such as The Wedding Canopy and Women Scrubbing the Pavements, an anguished memory of pre-war occupied Austria.

In 1971, Eric and Mary bought a house in Lincolnshire, where they settled permanently in 1976. Here, Doitch painted intensely coloured landscapes, exploring the relationship between the vast Lincolnshire skies and the textures and forms of the land. One of his favourite subjects was Frieston Shore, an eerie stretch of coast where ragged salt marshes form a watery bridge between earth and air. He painted it in many moods: both in sunlight and shadow. Doitch also produced many figurative drawings, paintings and pastels, and was a fine etcher. Although his figures have wonderful flesh tones and surface character, they seem impersonal, secretive and ghostly, and his urban settings have a sense of absence and intrigue. Perhaps this owed something to his experiences as a Jewish boy in Nazi Austria.

Doitch and his wife worked every day at opposite ends of their house, a rectory set behind a graveyard. In their dark kitchen, surrounded by clocks, sat a Victorian artist's manikin called Belinda, who was generally posed reading a newspaper, and gave most visitors a nasty fright. Doitch was passionate about his work, but rarely considered it finished and was always making changes or threatening to touch up works he had already sold. Many private collectors bought his work, and examples can be seen in many galleries, including the South London Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, Haifa, the Belzalel National Museum, Jerusalem and the Albertina in Vienna. Doitch died in Boston on 7 June 2000.