Austin Wormleighton obituary

Austin Wormleighton, who has died aged 81, was a rare example of a tenacious journalist successfully pursuing a radically alternative career as an art historian.While working at the Financial Times, Austin was researching his landmark biography of the Cornish painter Samuel John Lamorna Birch, A Painter Laureate (1995), which was followed by an equally authoritative biography, Morning Tide (1998), of John Anthony Park, who was a leading figure in the St Ives art colony during the interwar years.