Sculptor and decorative artist born in Longside, Aberdeenshire. His family moved to London and in 1925 he married Catherine Muriel Mann at Lavender Hill, Battersea. The couple moved to Norwich in the early 1930s and Moray-Smith secured a job with Morgan’s Brewery, Norwich, decorating their pubs with murals, comprising scenes either with local relevance or reflecting the name of the pub, using a variety of media for interiors and moulded and painted cement for exteriors. Surviving examples in Norwich include the Prince of Denmark in Sprowston Road, the Woolpack in Golden Ball Street, the Berstrete Gates in Ber Street, and the Coachmakers Arms in St Stephen’s Road. The museum at Cromer, northeast Norfolk, has two parts of a triptych by Moray-Smith, one depicting a beach scene, the other a lifeboat rescue (the third part having been lost). What is probably his last work is a bronze memorial plaque of an agricultural steam engine on the wall of a nineteenth-century engineering works opposite the Charles Burrell Museum in Thetford.
For some years, a story circulated that Moray-Smith was an Italian who had been a prisoner-of-war during the First World War and, following the war’s end, had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art where he met a young Englishwoman whose surname he adopted following their marriage. This was finally revealed as a romantic fabrication when Paul Burall of the Norwich Society published a research-based account in his 2017 booklet, John Moray-Smith: The eccentric Norwich artist.
Bibliography: altutt: ‘John Moray-Smith: muralist and mystery’; P. Burall, John Moray-Smith: The eccentric Norwich artist who brought individuality to our pubs with extraordinary panels showing local scenes through the ages (The Norwich Society), 2017; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xx, 57, 147; A. Hartley and C. Spencer, John Moray-Smith. A Very Public Artist, Norwich Society, 2006; Norwich Evening News (online edn), 24 March 2017: ‘The mystery life of Norwich’s eccentric genius of art’.
Terry Cavanagh, 2025