In this painting on the back wall is a painting by Burne Jones, which is now in the Southampton City Art Gallery. The piece of sculpture is called ‘Eve’ and is by Sir Thomas Brock (1847 – 1922) which is now in Tate Britain.

Fred Appleyard was a British landscape artist. He had 41 works exhibited during his lifetime by the Royal Academy and painted the mural ‘Spring driving out Winter’ in the Academy Restaurant.

Appleyard was born in Middlesbrough, England on 9 September 1874, the son of Isaac Appleyard, an iron-merchant. Having received his formal education at Scarborough, he attended Scarborough School of Art under the genre and landscape painter Albert Strange.

It was at the Scarborough School of Art that he met Harry Watson, the two were to remain lifelong friends. He then proceeded to the National Art Training School at South Kensington, and from there to the Royal Academy Schools, which he entered on 27 July 1897 at the late age of twenty-two. He was recommended to the R.A. by John Sparkes.

He was awarded the Turner Gold Medal, the Creswick Prize for landscape, the Landseer Scholarship and others. He carried out mural decorations for the Royal Academy Refreshment Room in 1903, St Mark’s, North Audley Street, two large paintings in Nottingham General Hospital and Church of SS Peter and Paul, Pickering, Yorkshire.

He worked in South Africa 1910–12. During the 1914–18 war he worked at the Woolwich Arsenal. Exhibited at the R.A. 1900–35 and the R.W.A. from 1918 until c. 1950.