member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1966, and was Guest Lecturer at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia, Perth (1966/67). In 1967 Gear received the David Cargill Award from the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, was appointed to the Fine Art Panel of the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design in 1968, elected FRSA in 1971, and awarded the Lorne Fellowship in 1975. The same year he retired from his Fine Art post, which by then was encompassed within Birmingham Polytechnic. Late works and exhibitions A touring exhibition (Paris, Chalon, and Rennes) of CoBrA artists' work during 1982/83 heralded a revival of interest in the movement (1948–51). Over the next decade he participated in group CoBrA exhibitions in several countries, and also held solo shows of his CoBrA period works in London (1987 and 1989) and Paris (1988). In 1994 he was awarded the Royal Academy's Sir Howard Barker Scholarship, and an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Central England. The following year he attended the opening of the new CoBrA Museum in Amstelveen, Holland, and was elected a RA. To celebrate his centenary in 2015, exhibitions were held at the Fosse Gallery Stow-on-the-Wold, The Redfern Gallery London, and a major retrospective which showed at the Towner Gallery Eastbourne, and City Art Centre Edinburgh. Death Gear died on 27 February 1997 in Birmingham. A few days before his death he had visited Hanover to receive the Leporello Prize from the government of Lower Saxony, to mark his work for "democratic art and artistic freedom". Legacy A retrospective of Gear's work, Colour and Form, was held at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists gallery in November 2017, and early the following year the house in Edgbaston where he had lived and worked from 1964 to 1997 was accorded a blue plaque. In 2019 a blue plaque was also added to Gildredge Manor, Eastbourne, the former Towner Art Gallery of which he was curator from 1958 to 1964. References Further reading McEwen, John. William Gear. Aldershot: Lund Humphreys, 2003. Lambirth, Andrew. William Gear. Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2015 External links Works by Gear in the Tate collection Works by Gear in the Fosse Gallery Works by Gear in the Scottish National Galleries 1915 births 1997 deaths 20th-century Scottish painters Scottish male painters Abstract painters Alumni of the Edinburgh College of Art