Neville Lewis

Alfred Neville Lewis (1895–1972) was a South African artist. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and educated there and, later, at the Slade School of Art in London.

His father was the Reverend A. J. S. Lewis, who was Mayor of Cape Town, and on 4 October 1929, officially opened the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway.

Neville married Theo Townshend a fellow student. He became a member of the New English Art Club in 1920. When his marriage broke up in 1922 his two sons Tom and David went to Cape Town where they were raised by their grandparents and his daughter Catherine stayed with his ex-wife.

He served in World War I in France, Belgium, and Italy.

During World War II he carried on producing portraits in oil. He frequently painted and drew black South Africans. Lewis painted three portraits of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery.[1]

He married Countess Rosa Cecilie Karoline-Mathilde Irene Sibylla Anna zu Solms-Baruth, daughter of Friedrich, 3rd Prince of Solms-Baruth and his wife Princess Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, on 3 November 1955 and settled on Rowan Street, Stellenbosch where their children Caroline and Frederick Henry Lewis attended school.

Later the couple acquired a small holding opposite the Stellenbosch Golf Club where his wife and children could pursue their love of horse riding. After his death in 1972 his wife married Weber.

The painting Portrait of Albert van der Sandt Centlivres by Lewis was burned by demonstrators during the Rhodes Must Fall upheaval at the University of Cape Town in February 2016.[2]