Artist, writer, broadcaster, teacher. Born into an East Kent farming family, as a boy he was taught English by W.H.Auden and Art by Maurice Feild, and met Benjamin Britten, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. During the Second World War he had to leave school to run the family farm after his father suffered a heart attack; when the farm was taken over by his brother, Andrew built a studio next to his mother's house. From 1947 he studied at the Camberwell College of Art in London, with William Coldstream and Victor Pinsent. His first one-man show was at Agnew's in 1953. His teaching career began at the Slade School where he was Senior Lecturer from 1950 to 1964; Head of the Department of Fine Art, Goldsmith's College, 1964 to 1970; Lecturer, Department of Art, Reading University 1971 to 72; Visiting Professor, Cooper Union, New York 1973 to 1974; Associate Dean, New York Studio School 1974 to 1975, Visiting Professor 1975 to 2002; Professor of Painting, Yale University 1975 to 1991, Dean of the School of Art 1975 to 1983, and William Leffingwell Professor of Painting 1991 to 1994 (Emeritus). Forge's painting was influenced by the American Abstract Impressionists Exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1959, and moved away from purely observational work over the next 40 years, although the starting point of the 'sticks' paintings was usually something seen. As a curator, Forge pioneered the 'mixed' exhibition, hanging works by contrasting and complementary artists - his show at the Studio School in New York in 2000 placed canvases by Walter Sickert, Coldstream, Adrian Stokes, and Bomberg alongside Klee, Mondrian, a Roman copy of a Greek torso, Seurat, Van Gogh, Giacometti, and John Cage. As a writer, his criticism appeared in Art News and Review, The New Statesman and The Listener; his books included studies of Paul Klee, Vermeer and Soutine. His first wife was Sheila Deane, with whom he had three daughters; the second American artist Ruth Miller.