Herbert Edward Read was one of the most influential theorists and promoters of modern art in Britain, with a career spanning over 50 years. He was born in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest of three sons of a tenant farmer. This rural childhood was to acquire a near-Edenic significance that would shape the development of Read’s creative and critical work. The romantic idyll was lost when his father died, causing the family to be evicted in 1903. Read grew up in a Halifax orphanage/boarding school, leaving in 1909 to work in Leeds as a bank clerk.