Highstreet Wendover, England c. 1912
Birthplace of Gordon Onslow Ford
Photo by Gertrude Stein at her country house in Belignin, 1939
Left to right: Yves Tanguy, Andre Breton, Gordon Onslow Ford,
Matta, Estaban Frances, Anne Matta, Jacqueline Breton Lamba.


Chemillieu, France, 1939. Left to Right:
Gordon Onslow Ford, Matta, Esteban Frances.
Photo by Elisabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin
Chermillieu, France, 1939. Left to right: Matta, Andre Breton, Aube Breton,
Gordon Onslow Ford, Esteban Frances
Photo by Elisabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin
Also Read
Biographical Notes
by Gordon Onslow Ford:
Excerpts from an interview
by Theodore E. Lindberg, Inverness, March 1984
GORDON ONSLOW FORD
Born in England in 1912, Gordon Onslow Ford is noted for having been the youngest member of the pre-World War II, Paris-based  Surrealist Group and for his lifelong pursuit of an independent path of discovery through his art. The trajectory of this pursuit  led him from England to Paris, to New York as a wartime émigré, and then to a remote Tarascan village in Mexico. After the war he  traveled up the Pacific west coast to San Francisco, eventually coming to rest on a hilltop in Inverness on the Point Reyes  Peninsula of California where he lived for fifty years until his death in 2003. 
Gordon Onslow Ford was the grandson of sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, one of Queen Victoria’s favorite artists who had married into  Bavarian aristocracy. Gordon’s father was a doctor who had been with the British army at Gallipoli and died not long after World  War I. Eight-year old Gordon was left with his mother, younger sister, and his uncle, the painter Rudolph Onslow Ford.  Gordon  learned about painting from his uncle and by age eleven he created his first accomplished landscape oil painting.  Although he had  shown an early interest in art, his guardians were determined that he should train for a career as a naval officer. At age  fourteen, they enrolled him in the Naval Academy at Dartmouth, England. After graduation as a mid-shipman, he was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet as a navigator’s assistant, pinpointing the ship’s location through observation of the stars. He filled the  journal he was required to keep with well-executed watercolors of the ship’s ports, landscapes and several self-portraits. The work was impressive enough to the ship’s officers that commissions soon followed.
Determined to devote himself to painting, Onslow Ford was able, with considerable difficulty given the tense political  climate, to resign his Navy commission in 1937. Moving to Paris, he enrolled briefly at the academy of André L’hote and the atelier  of Fernand Leger. Four days at the latter convinced him that he would do better on his own. His independence was encouraged by a  chance meeting with a young Chilean artist, Roberto Matta, who was employed as a draftsman in the atelier of Le Corbusier. The two  artists inspired and encouraged each other, vacationing together in a stone customs house during a rainy summer on the Brittany  coast and in a snow-bound chalet in the Swiss Alps. Together they read P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum in which the author urged  his readers to break the boundaries of the “prison house of sight” in order to grasp the continuum of time and space. “We were  trying” Onslow Ford recalled, “to enlarge perception. We wanted not to be limited by what we could see, but to extend in time, to  see through mountains, to see the roots of a tree as it grows.”
Toward the end of 1938, Onslow Ford was invited to join the Surrealist Group headed by André Breton and began attending  their meetings. As a Surrealist, Onslow Ford was initially interested in dreams. He was recording and making sketches of his own  dream experiences. Early on, however, it became apparent to him that it was impossible to paint dreams as the rendering of the  dream image was merely a copy of a past event. Unlike many Surrealists who were interested in Freud's theory of dreams, Onslow Ford  gravitated toward Carl Jung's idea of the Collective Unconscious. His new artistic passion focused on the archetypal,  non-representational aspects of consciousness.
 
On the eve of war in the summer of 1939, Onslow Ford rented a chateau in Chemillieu in the Rhone Valley of France near the  Swiss border. He was joined by Matta, Matta's wife Anne, André Breton, Esteban Frances, British surrealist Ithell  Colquhoun, the American artist Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, Jacqueline Breton with her daughter Aube. The summer was spent  painting and writing, with visits to the Palais Ideal du Facteur Cheval and to Gertrude Stein's home nearby. In the evenings Breton recited poetry, they all played games of chance and enthusiastically shared their work. Onslow Ford's sister, Elisabeth, who had  worked for the British photographer Dorothy Wilding and became an accomplished photographer in her own right, joined the group and  documented their time together. With the outbreak of war on September 2, Onslow Ford was ordered back to England to serve in the  Navy, while in the ensuing chaos his companions were dispersed in different directions.