Rigby Graham painter, printmaker and book illustrator, born in Manchester in 1931. In 1942 the family moved to Leicester and Rigby was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School. Graham enrolled at the Leicester College of Art, where he specialised in murals. In the late 1950s he returned to the College of Art as a part-time, later full-time, tutor, not of Fine Art, but as a member of the bookbinding department and later as Principal Lecturer in Teacher Training.
As well as teaching, Graham was a prolific writer, contributing to catalogues of other artists’ work, illustrated books, and articles in magazines and newspapers. A list of his publications, from 1959 to 1979, featured some 511 entries, covering subjects ranging from bookbinding in human skin to the silver mines of Sark and from Irish poetry to John Singer Sargent.
In the 1960s and 1970s Graham worked as a prolific book illustrator for private “fine art” presses ,of which he founded or co-founded two of his own.
From 1960 Graham showed his paintings at galleries around the British Isles. However his paintings were not well received unlike his Private Press Books.
