James Noble was born in Middlesex in 1919. He went to work in the family’s painting and decorating business but soon found that he had an aptitude for drawing and was encouraged to attend evening classes.

Noble studied at both the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and the Regent Street Polytechnic. He had as his master the well-known Scottish landscape painter and engraver Iain MacNab (1890-1970) who himself had been a pupil of the fashionable Glasgow School of Art and Heatherleys, the oldest independent art school in London (founded in 1845, which focused on figurative painting) and eventually became its Principle.

Noble soon found himself drawn to the flower paintings of the great 17th Century Dutch romantic artists such as Amb...