SIR Muirhead Bone was the first official war artist appointed to capture the scenes of the First World War and went on to receive a knighthood for his services to art.

He was born in Glasgow on March 23, 1876, died on October 21, 1953, and was laid to rest with his wife and son in the cemetery at St Mary’s Church, Whitegate.

Muirhead Bone qualified as an architect before turning to art and studying at the Glasgow School of Art, originally at evening classes.

Going on to establish himself in London, Muirhead Bone married Gertrude Dodd, the sister of his best friend, Francis Dodd, who was also a prominent etcher.

Gertrude was later to become a well-known author. The couple had two sons - Stephen, who was born in 1904 and Gavin, who was born in 1906.

During the First World War the head of the British War Propaganda Bureau appointed Bone as Britain’s first official war artist in May 1916.

Bone had lobbied hard for the establishment of an Official War Artists scheme, and in June 1916 he was sent to France with an honorary rank and a salary of £500.

Although aged 38 at the outbreak of war, he was spared from certain enlistment by his appointment. His small black and white drawings and their realistic intensity reproduced well in the government-funded publications of the day.

He was commissioned as an honorary Second Lieutenant, and served as a war artist with the Allied forces on the Western Front and with the Royal Navy for a time.

He arrived in France on August 16, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme and produced 150 drawings of the war before returning to England in October 1916.

Over the next few months, Bone returned to his earlier subject matter, drawing pictures of shipyards and battleships. He visited France again in 1917, where he took particular interest depicting architectural ruins.

Two volumes of Bone’s wartime drawings were published during the war, The Western Front and With the Grand Fleet. He was an active member of the British War Memorials Committee.

After the Armistice Bone returned to the type of works he produced before the war.

He received a knighthood in 1937 for services to art, and served as a Trustee and on the committees of several institutions including the Tate, the National Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.

In early 1940, at the age of 64, Muirhead Bone was again appointed as a war artist, but was this time commissioned as a major in the Royal Marines, and placed with the Admiralty.

He soon made drawings of the parade of sailors from the Ajax and Exeter, the ships which had cornered Germany’s Admiral Graf Spee in the Battle of the River Plate, and drew the last of the troops returning from Dunkirk.

Muirhead tackled the Second World War rather differently to the First World War; his work is on a much larger scale. In London he drew St Paul’s Cathedral from the ruined roof of St Bride’s Church and the destruction in the East End docks.

In Coventry, he drew the ruined Cathedral, and in Manchester he drew Dunlop’s balloon sheds. In Scotland, he drew battleships, the shattered hulls of torpedoed merchant ships and minesweepers at work in stormy seas. The latter he converted into a large oil painting. His great mass of drawings and paintings, from both wars, forms one of the most important sections of the Imperial War Museum.

Muirhead Bone’s son Gavin was plagued with recurring bouts of tuberculosis, which became a major factor in Muirhead’s life, and particularly in that of his wife Gertrude’s, who often had to nurse her son.

In the late 1930s, while still living in Oxford, Gavin’s TB became increasingly more severe; he was admitted to a sanatorium on the Norfolk coast and then moved to Vale Royal Great House, also known as Vale Royal Abbey the former seat of the Barons Delamere, at Whitegate. This had been requisitioned as a sanatorium during the war years.

In April 1942 Gavin succumbed to his illness, and the funeral and burial took place at St Mary’s Church.

During his latter days Sir Muirhead Bone and Lady Gertrude regularly visited their son. After Gavin’s death Sir Muirhead gave up his appointment as a war artist, and the vacant position was filled by his son Stephen, also well-respected in the field.

Sir Muirhead died of leukaemia in 1953 in Oxford and was buried in the same grave as his son at St Mary’s in Whitegate. Lady Gertrude later saw her husband commemorated by a tablet on a wall in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Following the death of her son Stephen in 1956, she went on to live a rather lonely life until her death in 1962, when she was similarly buried at St Mary’s Church. The grave has two joined headstones dedicated to Sir Muirhead and Lady Bone and a second dedicated to their son Gavin.

An autobiography of Sir Muirhead Bone was published in 2009, called Muirhead Bone, artist and patron, written by Sylvester Bone.