Cyril Victor Burr was born in London to parents James Arthur and Julia Hannah Burr on the 5thJuly 1908.
In 1939 he was living with his father in Battersea and working as a printer. In 1941 he moved to Crawley where he worked in agriculture at Tysons Nursery to help the war effort. In 1945 he married Elizabeth Tidy in Horsham. Together they lived in East Park, Crawley.
Encouraged by Elizabeth, Victor was a prolific painter, attending the West Sussex School of Painting and Drawing. Here he studied under R. O. Dunlop. He exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer exhibition in 1948 with two works St. Philip Neri, Arundel and Flowers with Still Life, and again in 1951 with The Blue Flower.
Victor worked in the Nightingales Coal Merchants shop. When Percy Nightingale would attend grain markets in Barnham and Chichester Victor often went with him and painted. Working in the shop, he also had access to the empty coal bags which could be used for painting instead of an expensive canvas. When Nightingales closed, Victor focused on painting for a while before returning to work at MacFisheries until he retired.
As well as painting, Victor was a skilled pianist and enjoyed amateur dramatics, reading and knitting.
Victor died in 1993, Elizabeth died 10 years later in 2003.
Today, Victor Burr is almost unknown. 6 of his pieces of work are listed on the Art UK website, five of these are held in the museum collection and the other is owned by Crawley Library.
