Neville Lewis

{{Short description|South African artist}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

Alfred Neville Lewis (1895–1972) was a South African artist. He was born in Cape Town, Cape Colony, 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.{{cite book |title=Master of the Battlefield Monty's War Years 1942-1944 |url=https://archive.org/details/masterofbattlefi00hami |url-access=registration |last1=Hamilton |first1=Nigel |publisher=McGraw-Hill Book Company |year= 1983 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/masterofbattlefi00hami/page/99 99–101]|isbn=9780070258068 }} He also painted several persons actively involved in the war effort ranging from a member of the South African Native Military Corps to a nurse. Several of these images were used for postage stamps during the war.{{cite journal |last1=Sinclair |first1=Allan |journal=Military History Journal of the South African Military History Society |title= The Use of the Neville Lewis Portraits for the Second World War Stamp Series |date=June 1998 |volume=11 |issue=1 |url=http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol111as.html |access-date=25 December 2021}}

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.[https://www.groundup.org.za/article/here-list-art-destroyed-uct/ GroundUp, 9 June 2017]