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拍品专文
Alfred Stephenson was a polar explorer and surveyor. Born in Norwich, Stephen’s captivation with the polar regions, began, aged 12, when he attended a public lecture by Ernest Shackleton. He later went on to study geography at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, where he became close to Frank Debenham, who had been on Robert Falcon Scott’s famed Terra Nova Expedition, in Antarctica between 1910-1913.
Stephenson, following his graduation, joined the British Arctic Air Route Expedition to Greenland as the chief surveyor, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal, and later became chief surveyor and meteorologist of the British Graham Land Expedition in the Antarctic. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Stephenson joined the RAF as chief instructor at the Central Allied Photo Interpretation Unit, for which he was awarded an OBE.
In 1940 Henry Lamb was appointed an official war artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee and amongst his roles for the War Office, was asked to produce portraits of the men and women who had supported the war effort, including a number of high-ranking commanders, such as Alfred Stephenson. Many of these works lie in public collections, such as the Imperial War Museum, who held exhibitions of his wartime work in 1958 and 1961.