Wadsworth, Edward Alexander (1889–1949)

English artist. Associated with the Vorticists, he first produced brightly coloured linear abstracts and made a remarkable series of semi-abstract woodcuts from 1913 to 1914. By the 1920s he had developed a crisp, realistic style in which inanimate objects (often connected with sailing) have a surrealistic quality, as in his well-known North Sea (1928; private collection).

Wadsworth was born at Cleckheaton, and educated at Fettes and the Slade. He served in the RNVR during World War I and became ARA in 1943. His book of copper engravings The Sailing Ships and Barges of the Western Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas was published in 1926.