Albert James (Jim) Enstone is better known as a flying ace than as an artist, though he was described as an artist when he died in Hemel Hempstead, England, in 1963.
Jim Enstone was born in Birmingham, England, in 1895, and became famous as a pilot in the First World War.
After the war was over, he became a civilian, and married Elsie Lilienfeld in 1920. Their daughter, June, was born in 1921. He went into business as a general merchant with Elsie’s brother, but the partnership was dissolved in 1924. In 1935, he married his second wife, Rica Hawkins, and he was listed as a civil servant in Hemel Hempstead in the 1939 Register.
Judging by this painting of a street scene, Enstone may have spent time in Lagartera, and may well have come to the pueblo through a friendship with José Ortiz Echagüe (1886 – 1930), one of Spain’s best-known photographers in the 1930s. Ortiz Echagüe had also been a pilot, though in a different war, and he had strong links with Lagartera, where he took a series of photographs for his book Tipos y Trajes (1930).