David Gentleman and Raymond first met soon after David had left the Royal College of Art. He had trained there in the Graphic Design School under Reynolds Stone, John Nash and Edward Bawden and at that stage of his career was already receiving commissions from Lyon’s teahouses, the London Underground and Penguin books, and later went on to attract many more prestigious clients.

In the 1950s Raymond and David had shared an assignment for the Architectural Review drawing and photographing aspects of provincial France. Thirty-five years later, when Raymond asked David during an interview for The Artist magazine to mark the publication of his book David Gentleman’s Paris, what artists had been a particular influence on him David cited Bewick, Bawden and Ravilious. This, he wrote, is more-or-less what he would have expected as he had always thought of him as a natural extension to that long list of illustrious names that make up the roll call of topographers who form the backbone of the English watercolour tradition. Raymond was a great admirer of those early 20th century artists and he considered Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden to be the ‘two most brilliant exponents of the modern idiom of watercolour drawing’. Both were themselves trained in the Design School at the Royal College of Art and were described by Paul Nash in the 1920s as part of that extraordinary ‘outbreak of talent’. Coincidentally both were born in 1903, as were John Piper and Graham Sutherland.

Today David is perhaps best known for his designs on posters, postage stamps (in the philatelic era when the design element seemed to matter) and wood engravings including those that were enlarged to form the platform-length mural at Charing Cross Underground station.

David Gentleman’s Paris is the fourth book in the series and is a ‘delicious collection of line and colourwash drawings fearlessly executed in what looks like an easy fluency’. Like the other books in the series, on Britain, London and Coastline, the illustrations are accompanied by a lively text. Since its publication in 1991, Paris has been followed by India and Italy.

David shared with Raymond the belief that drawing opens your eyes to the way things really look and what is fascinating to the artist about the subject. The experience they shared in the 1950s influenced the later work of both artists.