Simon Quadrat (b. 1946, London) is a British painter whose work draws heavily from the people and places of his childhood in postwar London. The son of Jewish émigrés who separately fled Germany in the 1930s, Quadrat grew up in a lively, multilingual household. His mother was both a painter and a pianist, and he began painting and playing music at an early age.

Quadrat studied law at Bristol University and went on to spend more than three decades as a criminal barrister in London and Bristol, eventually becoming Head of Chambers. Throughout his legal career, he continued to draw, paint, and study art, teaching himself in large part through books and frequent visits to London’s museums and galleries whenever time allowed. Early Sienese painting and British painting of the years immediately before and after the Second World War became particularly important influences.

In 2000, Quadrat left law to devote himself to painting full-time. His distinctive palette of pale blues, ochres, and burnt oranges recalls the visual character of the 1950s, while many of the streets, interiors, and characters that populate his paintings have their origins in the London he remembers from childhood.

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