Frank Bowling al Tate Britain

In the years around 1910, the Slade School of Art had what one of its tutors Henry Tonks called “a crisis of brilliance”, when its intake included an extraordinary cluster of artists who would go on to paint the defining images of the First World War – the likes of Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer. In 1959, it was the Royal College of Art’s turn: among its students were several figures who would help define the look of the 1960s, among them David Hockney, RB Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Allen Jones (although Hockney remembers the staff thinking this intake was “the worst they’d had for many, many years”).

One of the most precocious members of the cohort of 1959 has, however, been largely overlooked. Frank Bowling, a Guyana-born painter who moved to England in 1953, aged 19, was the RCA’s silver medallist on graduation in 1962 when Hockney was awarded the gold. It was Bowling, though, who had been destined for the top spot, until he scuppered his chances by marrying the assistant registrar Paddy Kitchen. As liaisons between staff and students were forbidden, he was temporarily expelled; his blackness added an extra frisson to the episode.