English painter – my daily art display

Benjamin Robert Haydon

The beginning.

Benjamin Robert Haydon

I was watching the film Mr Turner for the second time the other day and often on a second viewing of a film or the second reading of a book you come across things that you didn’t see the first time around. During the second viewing of the film about Turner I noticed a minor character in it who Turner referred to as Haydon. He was depicted as a “fussy” man who had great money troubles and was constantly approaching Turner for a financial loan. I had never come across an artist named Haydon and it peaked my interest. So, let me share with you a look at the life and works of a very troubled, whom some would say, was a very talented English artist. Let me introduce you to Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Benjamin Robert Haydon by William Nicholson RSA (c.1820)

Benjamin Robert Haydon was born in Wimpole Street in the south coast English garrison town of Plymouth on January 26^th, 1876. He had a younger sister Harriet; another sister, Sarah, had died in infancy. His father was Benjamin Robert Haydon who had married his wife Mary, one of eight children and the second daughter of the Rev. Benjamin Cobley, curate of Shillingford and later, the rector of Dodbrook, near Kingsbridge, in the county of Devon. Haydon’s father was a well-to-do printer, stationer and publisher and had a shop in Plymouth at 75 Market Place. He was also an amateur “special correspondent” to the Bristol Journal, who as he lived in a garrison town, he enjoyed writing about the valorous exploits of the English military heroes fighting for their country in various parts of the world.

The Banishment of Aristides from Athens by Benjamin Haydon

In 1792 Benjamin Haydon, then aged six, first attended school and it was the start of his interest in sketching and he would often draw rough portraits of his school friends.. The following year, 1793, England and France went to war and it was that same year that seven-year-old Benjamin Haydon attended the Plymouth Grammar School run by the headmaster, the Reverend Dr. Bidlake. Bidlake, Haydon recalled the head painted and played the organ and realising the young Haydon had a love and aptitude for sketching gave him and one of his fellow pupils some painting lessons. That fellow student was Samuel Prout who would later become a renowned watercolourist, and one of the masters of watercolour architectural painting. Bidlake encouraged Haydon to paint landscapes en plein air but this was countered by the advice given to him by a Neapolitan worker in his father’s business, a Mr. Fenzi, who would regale excitedly about the works of Raphael and Michelangelo. Haydon was excited about what he saw and heard and remembered Fenzi’s words of advice about ignoring landscape painting and concentrate on figurative painting:

“…Do not draw de landscape; draw de feegoore, Master Benjamin…”

When Haydon was eleven years old he contracted measles and was laid up in bed. He recalled the time well, as his father visited his bedside to excitedly announce the British naval victory at Cape St Vincent. Later Haydon recalled the excitement in the household with the news of Horatio Nelson’s naval victories.

Plympton Grammar School

(Photograph taken 28 August 2001 © Mr Gerald Rendle)

In 1798, at the age of twelve, Haydon left Plymouth Grammar School and was admitted as a boarder to All Hallows School in Honiton, some sixty miles from his home. Here the headmaster was Reverend William Hayne who was tasked by Haydon’s father to help his son improve his art. In 1800 Reverend William Hayne was offered a teaching post at Plympton Grammar School and he accepted and moved his family and pupils to Plympton St Maurice. In a way it was a return home for Haydon who had spent his early years nearby. Fifty years earlier the grammar school had been where the artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, studied and Reynold’s father had been the headmaster. In all, Haydon had been under the tutelage of Reverend Hayne for two years at Honiton and a further six months at Plympton Grammar where he rose to become head boy at the age of fifteen and by which time he had acquired a good understanding of the Latin, Greek, and French languages.

Haydon left the school and the world of the classic literature and had to decide on his next move. However, that decision was taken away from him by his father who saw his son as being his successor in the family business and so had his son move to Exeter where he studied business and as Haydon saw it, the dry tuition of profit/loss and ledgers. He was not enamoured by the world of finance and bookkeeping. His course lasted six months at which time he returned home to Plymouth where he was indentured for a period of seven years as an apprentice to his father. Life could not have been worse according to young Haydon who hated everything about the job. He hated everything – his father’s customers, serving behind the counter in his father’s shop, working on his father’s accounts. Nothing pleased him and he would spend long periods of time sulking at his lot in life.

Benjamin Haydon came to the conclusion that his future lay ahead as an artist. His father and his grandfather both had similar thoughts at Benjamin’s age but they soon faded and Benjamin’s father believed the same would happen to his son’s great artistic ambitions. Heated and constant family arguments followed on a daily basis over young Haydon’s future, so much so, Haydon became ill and suffered severe inflammation of his eyes. Benjamin’s father believed this would put an end to his son’s fantasies of becoming an artist and told him he could never become an artist as he couldn’t see properly, but he was mistaken for his son was not to be deflected.

Discourses by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Haydon believed that his eyesight problem was not a major stumbling block and he was buoyed by the words of Joshua Reynolds in his first Discourse he delivered to the Royal Academy during the opening session in January 1769. Reynolds set out his theories on art in a series of fifteen lectures in the Royal Academy Schools, which were later published as Discourses on Art. It was all about the fact that nothing would be achieved without hard work. Reynolds said:

“…But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution inciting them on one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from mere impatience of labor, to take the citadel by storm. They wish to find some shorter path to excellence and hope to obtain the reward of eminence by other means than those w4iich the indispensable rules of art have prescribed. They must, therefore, be told again and again that labor is the only price of solid fame, and that whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy method of becoming a good painter…”

Haydon met Samuel Northcote, one of his father’s customers and hearing of young Haydon’s wish to become an artist Northcote advised him to study anatomy. Haydon took that advice and purchased a book at the Plymouth Naval Hospital Auction entitled Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body written by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus in 1749 It cost him two pounds ten shillings, an amount he did not have ! This attitude to buying things he could not afford would haunt him all his life. Haydon rushed home and spoke to his father who grudgingly gave him the money. Haydon immersed himself in the anatomy book and after two weeks of constant studying the drawings and information, he claimed that he knew every muscle and every bone in the human body.

Haydon’s constant battle with his mother and father as to his future continued with neither side relaxing their stance. However, he must have finally worn them down as they finally agreed to him travelling to London and enrolling on a two-year course at the Royal Academy Schools. They gave him an initial twenty pounds to cover the cost of lodgings which he secured in the Strand, close to Somerset House, the home of the Royal Academy. The course was free of charge but to get a place on the course one had to be recommended by an Academician. This was achieved through Haydon’s uncle Benjamin Cobley who contacted his friend and Academician, Prince Hoare. Haydon left Plymouth on an overnight coach on the morning of May 4^th 1804 and arrived in London the next day.

Haydon, on arrival in London, took lodgings at 3 Broad Street, Carnaby Market. One of the first outings Haydon made was to the Royal Academy’s thirty-sixth annual exhibition which was being held at Somerset House (The Royal Academy did not move to its present location at Burlington House on Piccadilly until 1868). There was a one shilling entrance fee which entitled you to a catalogue and according to the catalogue outlined the reason for the charge:

“…it was to prevent the Rooms from being filled by improper Persons, to the entire Exclusion of those for whom the Exhibition is apparently intended…”

Laocoön’s head

Haydon settled into his course at the Royal Academy Schools and studied hard. He decided that his favoured painting genre would be that of historical paintings. The first stage of his admission to the Royal Academy Schools was to present a drawing from plaster casts and so he immediately went to a seller of plaster casts who had a shop in nearby Drury Lane. Here he purchased a cast of Laocoön’s head, a famous pieces of Hellenistic sculpture, along with some casts of arms, hands and feet and these together with his copy of Albinus’ anatomy book he set about creating acceptable drawings. He worked non-stop and described his daily ritual:

“…I rose when I woke, at three, four or five; drew at anatomy until eight, in chalk from my casts from nine to one and from half-one until five – then walked, dined and to anatomy again from seven to ten and eleven…”

Dissection of the neck from the 1794 book ‘Engravings, Explaining the Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles and Joints’ by John Bell.

Another early purchase Haydon made was a copy of the 1794 book Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles and Joints by John Bell and this was to supplement his Albinus book on anatomy.

It took a while before he made meaningful friendships with the exception of his sponsor and Royal Academy’s Secretary of Foreign Correspondence, Prince Hoare, who, on seeing Haydon’s sketches introduced him to John Opie and James Northcote. Opie concurred with Haydon as to the importance of studying anatomy whereas Northcote advised Haydon to forget about anatomy and historical paintings and concentrate on portraiture but Haydon would not be deterred. At the meetings Haydon spoke to the two artists about whether he should take lessons from a master. Once again Opie and Northcote had differing views. Opie was for it, Northcote against it saying Opie was only interested in extracting money from Haydon and Haydon’s father. In the end he decided to follow Opie’s advice about studying anatomy but Northcote’s advice with regards not working under a master painter.

The Nightmare by Fuseli (1781)

On Christmas Eve 1804 Prince Hoare introduced Haydon to the Academy’s Professor of Painting, the Swiss-born painter John Henry Fuseli. Fuseli held the position at the Royal Academy as Keeper, who carried overall responsibility for the Royal Academy Schools. Haydon had seen Fuseli’s “strange” works such as his 1781 painting The Nightmare and his 1802 painting, Uriel watches Saturn on his Flight to Earth, a print of which he remember seeing in his father’s shop and so was delighted to visit this great master in early January and show him his sketches. Fuseli was duly impressed with Haydon’s works and granted him admission to the RA Schools as a Probationer.

A sheet of anatomical drawings of the bones, muscles and tendons of the arm and hands by Benjamin Haydon (ca. 1805)

One of Haydon’s early tasks he had to perform at the RA School was to copy a cast but the object was set up some distance from him and he realised that his poor sight was going to pose a problem and so had to purchase a pair of spectacles. Haydon continued to work hard and such attitude found favour with Fuseli.

The statue of the athlete Discobulus by Myron (c.450BC)

In March 1804, having completed the task of drawing the figure of Discobolus he received his “ticket” and became a ”Student of Painting”. Shortly after, Haydon was summoned home by his family as his father was dying. However, despite still being a patient at Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth his father had recovered and Haydon remained in the city that summer. Haydon immediately sought permission from the hospital authorities to draw from their collection of preserved human bones with dried muscle. He drew obsessively, combining his depiction of the specimens with poses typically found in anatomical textbooks.

Anatomical drawing of the bones and muscles of the lower leg by Benjamin Haydon (1805)

The result was an album with a collection of anatomical drawings. Haydon believed that anatomy was the key to comprehending the ‘principles of heroic form’ which would then result in successful completion of grand historical works which was still his artistic aim. His ambition was to become the greatest historical painter England had ever known.

……to be continued

The majority of the information I have used in this and the subsequent blogs on the life of Benjamin Haydon came from an excellent second-hand book, published in 1998, I came across entitled A Genius for Failure, The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon by Paul O’Keefe. If you are interested in Haydon’s life, I can highly recommend you try to get yourself a copy.

William James Muller. Part 2.

The Later years

The Gaol Burning and St Paul’s Bedminster by William Muller (c.1831)

William Muller’s home in the city of Bristol was rocked by civil unrest in 1831. The Reform Riots, as they became known, took place between the 29^th and 31^st of October and were part of the 1831 riots in England. The riots came about because of the second Reform Bill which was voted down in the House of Lords, and consequently shelved efforts at electoral reform. The Bristol Riots were a reaction to the statement in Parliament of a senior judge, Sir Charles Wetherell, that the people of Bristol were not in favour of reform, despite 17,000 signatures on a petition supporting the reforms.

The Burning of the Bishop’s Palace by William Muller (c.1831)

It was at a time when only five per cent of the population, (and they had to be men!) had the right to vote which was based on their wealth. Wetherell came to Bristol on his annual visit to Bristol, public meetings were organised in Queen Square on 10th, 11th and 12th October to decide on how to carry the fight forward. Demonstrators met Wetherell on his arrival in Bristol on October 29th, and soon, full scale rioting broke out, with angry crowds of protesters taking control of the city for two days.

The Burning of the Mansion House, Queens Square by William Muller (1831)

Troops were brought in to end the riots and Wetherell escaped dressed as a woman while the crowds stayed, looting the wine cellar of the Mansion House and becoming drunk and reckless. Over the next two days rioters broke into Bridewell Jail and Lawford’s Gate Prison and set prisoners free. The Tollhouses, the Bishop’s Palace and, in Queen Square, the Mansion House and the Custom House, were all attacked.

Ruins of Warehouses in Prince Street by William Muller (c.1831)

Nineteen-year-old William Muller and his younger brother, Edmund, witnessed the riots first hand. William made several sketches of the buildings in flames and the ruins of what remained. Later he turned the sketches into a number of paintings such as Rioting in Queen’s Square, The Remains of the Mansion House, Ruins of the Custom House, with only the bare and broken columns standing. He also completed a work entitled Removing the Prisoners at night to the Gaol, with the glare of burning buildings all around.

Of all Muller’s painting trips he undertook, North Wales was one of his favourite destinations. In a letter to a friend he called the area, Our English Switzerland. His first foray to the region was in June 1833 when he along with fellow artists, John Skinner Prout and Samuel Jackson left Bristol, crossed the River Severn and traversed the Brecon Beacons, finally arriving at the foothills of Cader Idris.

Llyn y Cau by Richard Wilson (1765)

The three men climbed part of the way up the mountain to gain a view of Llyn-y-Cau, a lake Muller referred to as Wilson’s Lake after Richard Wilson’s magnificent depiction of the lake in his 1765 painting.

Swallow Falls, Betwys y Coed by William Muller (1837)

Muller and Prout parted company with Jackson and explored the Conwy Valley from Betwys-y-Coed, all the way down to the sea. Muller was so taken with what he saw that he returned to the area on several occasions. During the winter of 1841 he and his brother travelled to North Wales and stayed at an inn in “Roe” now the small village of Rowen which was up-river from the coastal town of Conwy. He returned the following summer to paint en plein air in oils. In a letter to a fellow artist he wrote:

“…I paint in oil on the spot, and rather large, indeed. I am more than ever convinced in the actual necessity of looking at nature with a much more observant eye than the mass of young artists do, and in particular at skies. These are generally neglected…”

Salmon Trap on the River Lledr by William Muller (1842)

Interior with Goats, Betwys y Coed by William Muller (c.1833)

In July 1834, twenty-two year old Muller set off for Europe on a seven-month journey of discovery along with his good friend and fellow artist, the watercolourist, George Arthur Fripp. They left Bristol docks on a schooner and sailed to Antwerp. Having disembarked they went to Brussels and then moved across the German border, arriving in Cologne. They then followed the river south, eventually arriving at Heidelberg where they rested for several days.

The Doge’s Palace, Venice by William Muller (1834)

The pair crossed the Alps and arrived in Northern Italy, visited the area around Lake Maggiore and staying in the lakeside town of Baverno. Finally they arrived in Venice where they stayed for almost two months.

The Falls of Tivoli by William Muller (1837)

At the end of November 1834 they moved to Florence on their way to Rome where they spent that Christmas. The one place Muller was determined to visit was Tivoli a town 30 kilometres north-east of Rome, where many British watercolourists had visited and stayed to capture the spectacular views. Muller made many sketches and in 1837 completed his painting The Falls of Tivoli.

View of Bristol from Clifton Wood by William Muller (1837)

Muller returned to Bristol from his European tour in February 1835 and he set about converting his European and North Wales sketches into finished oil paintings. In 1838 he once again left the shores of England and this time his ultimate destination was Egypt. He went via Paris where he managed to visit the Louvre and was impressed by the landscape works of the Dutch painter, Jacob van Ruisdael and the Swiss painter, Francisco Mola. Muller travelled overland to Marseille and then embarked on a sea passage to Malta and Constantinople. From there he took a boat to the Greek island of Siros and then journeyed to Piraeus and Athens where he stayed for six weeks.

Temple of Theseus by William Muller (1839)

Whilst in the Greek capital Muller completed more than forty watercolours, many of which were of the Acropolis or views from this elevated monument. Athens had been a popular destination for artists and this love of the area could be put down to James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s 1762 book, Antiquities of Athens. It was the first of four volumes and was the first accurate survey of ancient Greek architecture ever completed. Their detailed drawings done at the sites of the ancient ruins between 1751 and 1754 transformed our understanding of Greek architecture.

In November 1838 Muller left Greece and set sail on a French steamer for Egypt. He disembarked at Alexandria. Although earlier artists, such as Turner, and the marine painter Clarkson Stanfield, had produced drawing of Egyptian sites using sketches made by amateur artists, none had actually visited the country and it is thought that William Muller was one of the first established European artists to set foot in Egypt.

Prayers in the Desert by William Muller (Exhibited at the RA in 1943)

Muller was impressed with Alexandria, likening it to a kaleidoscope of humanity but the Egyptian town was, in his view, bettered by what he saw when he visited Cairo with its long delicate minarets and Asyut but it was the mass of people of these cities that astonished him the most. His most exciting time was when he mingled with the people at the slave market and he liked to immerse himself amongst the crowds dressed in their highly coloured clothes.

The Ramesseum at Thebes, Sunset by William Muller (1840)

In December 1838, Muller left Cairo and journeyed down the River Nile and on December 10^th got his first sight of the pyramids at Giza. In his book, An Artist’s Tour of Egypt he recounted life on the small river boat:

“…it is tedious, to an extent one can form little conception of, to be shut up in a small boat, with not enough room to stand upright – 9 feet long and in its widest 6 – with little to do but shoot from its windows at crocodiles, pelicans and other birds, in particular vultures; of these being particularly fond of objects of Natural History, I made a tolerably numerous collection…..Shooting, sketching and smoking, at the expiration of twenty days I found I had arrived at Dundara…”

The Entrance to a Small Temple at Medinet Habu, Luxor, by William Muller (1840)

On January 1^st 1839, at the end of his four hundred mile journey up the Nile, Muller arrived at Thebes. Here on the eastern banks were temples at Luxor and Karnak and on the western side the Ramesseum, the ruined mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Qurnah, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens and many more monuments.

The Pyramids by William Muller (1843)

Despite the sometimes treacherous conditions, his expedition resulted in some of the finest travel records of any artist of the 1840s. Muller eventually returned home to Bristol via Malta, Naples, Rome and London in March 1839. Once home he set about completing paintings from sketches he made during is long journey.

In late Autumn 1839 William decided that he needed metropolitan success with his work and left Bristol and moved to London and he and fellow artist, Edward Dighton moved into a residence on Rupert Street, Haymarket and later 22 Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury. Muller and Dighton joined the Clipstone Street Academy at which figurative painting was taught using models and life classes and this was important to Muller who had been weak when it came to drawing figures.

Tomb in the Water, Telmessos, Lycia by William Muller (1845)

Muller, along with fellow artist, Harry Johnson, visited the eastern Mediterranean for the second time when the pair travelled to Lycia, a remote part of south west Turkey, in September 1843. There, he had camped for months and encountered ferocious storms, torrential rain, and endured living close to malarial swamps. Muller eventually made his way home in April 1844 after being away for eight months. He left his numerous sketches in London to be framed and headed to Bristol to stay with his brother. He contacted his patron, William Wethered, and and on May 7^th 1884, wrote to him about the Lycia expedition:

“…I am home at last – after a most fatiguing travel…….I will look forward to showing you what I have done in sketches – they are satisfactory I believe, & contain some splendid subjects – but I almost question if I had foreseen what I have had to go through to obtain them if I should ever have visited the country…”

Flower Piece by William Muller (1845)

In early 1845 William Muller became ill, probably exhausted due to overworking. He had at that time numerous commissions to complete and he believed they would lead to him becoming a very successful painter. He was disappointed and annoyed with how is paintings were exhibited at that year’s Royal Academy exhibition but nevertheless carried on painting despite his rapidly deteriorating health. His fingers became swollen and he was finding it difficult to hold a paint brush. On September 8^th 1845 whilst his brother was setting his palette for him to work on a still-life painting, William Muller fell back and died aged just 33.

Wooded Landscape with Children by William Muller (1845)

Muller is buried in the Unitarian burial ground, Brunswick Cemetery, off Brunswick Square, Bristol. His grave is marked by a simple polished black stone slab inscribed Sacred to the memory of William James Muller who died Sep 8th 1845. A bust of the painter is located at the entrance to the cloister in Bristol Cathedral.

William James Muller. Part 1.

The Early Years

After two blogs featuring contemporary artists whose style of work may not find favour with many who love depictions they can relate to, I have returned to a more conventional painter. William James Muller was a British figurative and landscape painter who was associated with the Bristol School, often referred to as the Bristol School of Artists, the informal association and works of a group of artists working in Bristol, England, in the early 19th century.

Muller, (or Müller) was born in Bristol on June 28^th 1812 at 13 Hillsbridge Place, later becoming Hillsbridge Parade, which overlooked a man-made cut where the occasional small boat or barge would pass by. His father, John Samuel Müller, a Prussian by birth, had been born in Danzig in 1779 but in 1801 when he was twenty-two, with the continuing conflict between Prussia and France, he and some friends decided to flee the country. His method of escape was thought to be on a cargo boat carrying timber and which was plying its trade between the Baltic and Bristol. Although arriving in the British city almost penniless, his love, knowledge and achievements in natural history and geology soon found favour with members of the Philosophical and Literary Society of Bristol who took him under their wings. In 1821 William’s father published A Natural History of the Crinoidia or Lily-Shaped Animals and three years later he became the first curator of the Bristol Institution which later became the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

East Lynn, Lynmouth by Edmund Gustavus Muller

In 1806, five years after arriving in Bristol, John Samuel Muller married Margaret James who came from a well established Bristol family. In 1808 the couple had their first child, Henry who later became a country doctor. Their second born was William James who is the subject of this blog and their third and final offspring, born in 1816, was Edmund Gustavus who at first was trained to become a doctor but he, like William, became a well-known painter.

In the Vale of Llangollen by James Baker Pyne (1840)

William James Muller was initially home-educated by his mother. In 1824, when he was twelve years old he began to be involved in his father’s work at the Bristol Institution sketching some of the establishment’s discoveries and would provide illustrations which then accompanied his father’s lectures. In that same year, the Bristol Institution began to hold art exhibitions which young William Muller would have witnessed. In 1827, when he was just sixteen years of age, his father had him apprenticed to the Bristol landscape painter James Baker Pyne whose works often depicted local views as well as imaginary ones.

Falls on the River Lledr by William Muller (1830)

William Muller completed his apprenticeship with James Pyne in 1829. The abrupt end to the apprenticeship came when William’s father complained to Pyne with regards how he was giving his son menial tasks to complete such as brush cleaning instead of teaching him artistic techniques. Pyne responded by telling John Muller that he could break his son’s apprenticeship agreement if he wanted to and Muller Senior did just that ! Although it is thought that Pyne’s work did not influence Muller work greatly William did learn to appreciate the Old Masters especially the works of the seventeenth century painters such as Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin.

Classical Landscape by William Muller (1828)

The early termination of the agreement between Pyne and Muller did not put a barrier between them in later years and they always spoke about each other with a complimentary tone. In 1843 Muller wrote to a friend about Pyne saying:

“…In early life placed under the direction of my friend J. B. Pyne — nay, serving a regular apprenticeship to the arts with him, to whom I owe so much — I commenced painting in earnest…”

Landscape with Figures by William Muller

On May 25th 1830, William’s father died, aged 51. As he had been the sole family earner, the family would have struggled financially but this was avoided when the Bristol Institution agreed to buy John Muller’s extensive natural history collection for the sum of seven hundred and thirty pounds. John Muller had brought up his sons to appreciate and love nature and the natural world and William never forgot his father’s words. In a letter of 1843, William wrote:

“…Travel to me affords two pleasures—my love of botany, and natural history in general (for I cannot forget the impressions given me by my father, to whose acquirements as a man of science his works testify better than aught I can say). I continue to combine them as much as possible with my profession; a new flower often delights me as much as a new sketch…”

Waterfall by William Muller (c.1830)

The executor of William’s father’s will was the Right Reverend Dr. Beeke of Bristol Cathedral and it was he who commissioned William Muller to complete a painting of St Mary Redcliffe church and on completion he paid William £25. The curate of the church was Reverend James Bulwer, an amateur artist and naturalist who was a good friend of the artist, John Sell Cotman and he and William Muller helped the formation of the first art exhibition of the Bristol Society of Artists at the Bristol Institution in 1832. He and William each presented eight of their paintings at the exhibition.

Font at Walsingham Church by William Muller (1831)

In the early part of 1831 Muller travelled to Norfolk and Suffolk and stayed with various clergymen during his two-month travels. One of the paintings he completed during his trip was entitled The Font in Walsingham Church, although he probably completed the work once home in his studio, using sketches he made at the time.

Muller may have got the idea for his painting on seeing the illustration of the font in Architectural Antiquities of Norfolk by John Sell Cotman, dated 1818.

Trees, Suffolk by William Muller (1831)

During this period William Muller completed a number of largely monochrome watercolours such as Trees, Suffolk which he had sketched whilst visiting the Suffolk town of Lackford.

Fourteen Star Inn by William Muller (c.1832)

Another was of the Fourteen Star coaching inn.

In the second part of the blog looking at the life and works of William James Muller we will see how bloody riots and Mediterranean travel featured in his short life.

John Downton

My featured artist today is the lesser-known British painter John Downton who was born on March 27^th, 1906 in the Kent town of Erith, some twenty kilometres south-east of London. He was the youngest of three children of Albert Victor and Flora Edith Downton (née Mitchell). John had two older sisters, Hilda and Mary both of whom had intended to study medicine but their plans were thwarted by family circumstances and health reasons.

At the age of four John attended the Erith Convent where he was a pupil for the next four years. In 1914 he transferred to the Erith Grammar School. It was around this time that John developed a love for music. His father played the flute and the piano and was a prominent member of the local church choir. John’s uncle, Hedley, gave John a violin and during the following years John became an important member of the school orchestra. The other great love of the teenager was his desire to read, particularly books by ancient philosophers and other “serious” works of English literature.

*Portrait of a Young Woman by John Downton (1929)*

Apart from his music and books, John had an overriding passion for art and even built a summer house/studio in the family garden where he did his painting. When he was seventeen the school entered his pencil sketch, Biplanes: A Study, into the Royal Drawing Society at the Guildhall, London and he was awarded a Silver Medal. As a teenager he was fascinated by all things military and penned many sketches of war machines and yet, later in life he became a pacifist.

Woman at the Window by John Downton (1934)

In 1922, when he was sixteen years old, his mother noticed an advert in The Times which stated that a Professor Gaugot, who was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, was willing to teach an English boy to speak French and so young John Downton headed to Paris where he stayed with the Gaugot family.

*Child with Roses by John Downton (1936)*

A year later in 1923 John accompanied his two sisters to Italy where they visited Venice and the Northern Italian Lakes as well as the Swiss towns of Lucerne and Lugano. This was the start of John’s love affair with travel. His favourite destinations were Northern Italy and Switzerland.

Having completed his schooling John was accepted into Queen’s College, Cambridge. Initially he took Part 1 of the English Tripos and in 1927 was placed into the Second Class but the following year he decided to abandon English and instead enrolled in the History of Art course and once completed, he received a First Class degree. During his three years at the university John immersed himself in their musical activities.

In the Autumn of 1928, having completed his three-year degree course, John Downton enrolled at the Slade School of Art which at the time was presided over by Henry Tonks, a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist who was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1918 to 1930. John, like many of the Old Masters of the past, preferred the medium of tempera but the Slade tutors wanted him to change his favoured painting medium and embrace a more modern style of painting. There was to be no common ground and so on May 21^st 1929, John resigned. In a forward to John Downton’s 1937 book, The Death of Art, an art critic and author wrote about Downton’s falling out of love with the Slade and the Academy’s thoughts on art. He wrote:

“…A certain kind of rather drably coloured, sober urban realism was the style in favour. Not for Downton though: he had pretty certainly made up his mind what he wanted to do and what sort of painter he wanted to be well before he arrived at the Slade and it has much more to do with the legacy of Piero della Francesca than that of Sickert and Cezanne…”

Downton’s art was a return to the art of the early Renaissance.

In 1930 John Downton and his sister set off on an European trip. They based themselves in the Côte d’Azur town of Menton and from there they took day trips out to the Italian Riviera towns of Ventimiglia and Genoa. Much longer trips were taken by the pair when they visited Milan and Lugano as well as his beloved Italian Lakes.

*Portrait of a Young Lady by John Downton (1929)*

Around 1930, John bought Park Cottage in the Kent village of Sundridge, some twenty miles, south-east of London. He spent much of his time renovating the property and buying antique furniture at auction to furnish the rooms. After two years living there, he realised it was too small for him and his artwork and so he moved out and rented the cottage to a fellow artist, Vincent New.

In April 1932 John Downton was awarded his M.A. and, as if to celebrate the successful completion of his studies, he took a trip to Tunis and returned via Naples, where he remained for a few months. On arriving back to England John searched for a new home and eventually purchased a property with a north-facing conservatory in which he could paint. The property was in Observatory Gardens, in the London borough of Kensington.

Around 1935, John Downton completed a poignant in memoriam portrait of his cousin Frances Witts. She had died of pneumonia aged just twenty-six. He used a family photograph for this work.

*Portrait of a Lady in Yellow by Alesso Baldovinetti (1465)*

Downton was influenced by profile portraits executed by Florentine painters such as Baldovinetti’s 1465 work entitled Portrait of a Lady in Yellow but art historians believe this portrait of his cousin was influenced by the Milanese painter, Ambrogio’ de Predis and his c.1490 work, Beatrice d’Este, which was once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Portrait of a Lady (Beatrice d’Este) by Ambrogio’ de Predis

Downton’s memorial portrait has a dark and rich tonal quality and he has based it on a conservative portrait of the past and has accomplished an image that is both solemn and inspiring. The woman in Downton’s portrait, like the Italian females in the portraits mentioned earlier, includes a necklace with diminishing size of beads whilst her hair is similarly geometric but in Frances Witts’ case it is gathered at the sides rather than at the back of the head.

Between 1936 and 1940 John Downton exhibited work at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. His two submissions in 1936, which were considered to be his masterpieces, were The Battle and and Nora Russell. The latter painting was executed in egg tempera and, despite it being a simple depiction of a young schoolgirl, it is evocative in the way it reminds us of the spirit of Quattrocento female portraiture, that is to say, female portraiture in fifteenth-century Italy, which portrayed womanly perfection as established in Catholic doctrine, illustrating the special social roles that upper-class women fulfilled at the time.

The title, The Battle, the second of his submitted painting to the 1936 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, is to do with conflict but not a battlefield scene, as you may have expected. It is all about the battle between modern industrialisation and the ideal of Renaissance humanism, which was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, a cultural legacy, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity.

*Erasmus of Rotterdam by Hans Holbein the Younger (1523)*

The figure and its stance in the painting is based upon Holbein’s 1523 work, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus was the leading humanist at the time. Both works accentuate the hands of the sitter. In the Louvre collection there are studies of hands made by Holbein as preliminaries for his painting. In Downton’s painting we see through the window an abstract depiction of a modern factory.

John Downton was always on the move and made many more house relocations and in August 1937 he took up residence in Cambridge. That year he submitted his work entitled Joan Harris to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition where it was subsequently chosen to be shown in The Prominent Living Artists Exhibition which was staged at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth. Joan Harris was the daughter of John Downton’s Cambridge neighbour. From a letter she wrote him during the sittings for the portrait we can gather that Downton completed more than just this one portrait of her. She wrote:

“…I hope you will finish the picture soon; but if you ever want me to come and sit for you again, just let me know and I will come any time that I am able.

When you have finished the picture I hope I will be able to see it and if you get the first picture back in Cambridge I would like to see it, and I know Mummy and Daddy would love to see it as they never saw it when it was completed…”

*Portrait of a Girl by John Downton (1938)*

Downton’s 1938 submission to the RA Summer Show was Portrait of a Girl which unusually for Downton depicted the model against a landscape background giving the impression that it was a plein air portrait. There is a definite resemblance to the style of one of my favourite portrait artists, Gerald Brockhurst.

*Portrait of a Woman by John Downton (1955)*

A strange looking portrait going under the title Portrait of a Woman was completed by John Downton in 1955.

*Edith Sitwell by Pavel Tchelitchew (1935)*

It is thought that the depiction was loosely based on the Polish painter, Pavel Tchelitchew’s portrait of his good friend Edith Sitwell in 1935.

*Girl Conducting by John Downton (1940)*

In 1938, now living in Cambridge, Downton was having to cope with the rejection by Faber & Faber of his manuscript, The Death of Art, but which was published years later. In 1940 Downton submitted three paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Eve, A Girl Conducting, and A Child. His painting entitled Girl Conducting is all about his depiction of the girl’s hands and it is such a facet in many of his works. The finished product did not come easily for Downton, who made numerous sketches of hands until he had perfected them. Many of the depictions were influenced by Renaissance paintings. The three paintings Downton submitted to the RA that year were to be the last of his offerings to that establishment.

*Woman in Flemish Head Dress by John Downton*

So why did Downton stop exhibiting his work at the RA ? In the foreword to Downton’s book The Death of Art, which his sister, Hilda, finally had published in 1995, the writer and critic John Russell Taylor explained:

“…He seems to have felt himself marginalised in a world increasingly unsympathetic to everything he stood for. In 1939 he moved to Florence in an attempt to escape the materialist twentieth century, but then almost immediately had to return to Britain at the outbreak of war. The war itself was even more of an alienating factor, a total outrage to his dearly held pacifist principles. And a general feeling that the mainstream of British Art was moving further and further away from his own ideals, first into luxuriant Romanticism and then into freeform abstraction, caused him to withdraw altogether from exhibiting his own art after 1940…”

Now back home in England with the war waging in Europe, John Downton received his conscript papers. Downton had always been a pacifist and went before the Review Board to argue his case for not fighting. The Board accepted that he was a genuine conscientious objector and so, in September 1940, he was put to work on a farm near Ludlow. That same year his two sisters moved north to Pitlochry in Scotland and later Downton moved north to be with them and work on the land of the local farmer.

*Portrait of a Woman by John Downton (1940)*

When the war ended Downton moved south and took up residence in the Kent town of Sevenoaks. He remained there for two years but then returned to Cambridge where he stayed until 1964 but when his lease ran out on the property he was renting in 1971 he moved back to Sevenoaks and rented a large ground floor flat with a cellar, close to where his sisters, Hilda and Mary were then living. Mary became very ill with asthma in 1986 and died. In December 1990 a water pipe burst in the cellar and caused a flood which partly destroyed some of his books and manuscripts he had stored in the room. He struggled to save and move the heavy boxes of books and this exertion damaged his heart. He was confined to hospital for two weeks and on discharge went to live with his sister, Hilda, who looked after him during his final days. John Downton died on July 31^st 1991, aged 85.

John never married but was in no way a recluse as his time was taken up with his painting and his love of music. He had many friends who valued his company. His sister, Hilda died in 2006, aged 104.

Helen Allingham

When depicting life in rural England, artists had to decide whether their depictions would focus on the hard lives endured by the peasant workers or focus on the beautiful idyllic life folk had who managed to escape the industrialization of the cities. The artist I am looking at today was of the second group of painters who wanted to cast her artistic spotlight on the beauty of rural life and was well known for her depictions of country cottages. Let me introduce you to Helen Allingham.

Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born into a well-to-do middle-class family on September 26th, 1848 in the small village of Swadlincote, near Burton on Trent in Derbyshire, England. She was the eldest of seven children born to Alexander Henry Paterson, a rural physician, and Mary Chance Herford, the daughter of a Manchester wine merchant. Within her first year of her life, the Patersons moved to Altrincham, Cheshire where Helen’s father set up a medical practice and the young family grew and prospered. It was during these years that young Helen’s interest and talent in art blossomed, inspired by her maternal grandmother, Sarah Smith Herford, a landscape painter and her aunt, Laura Herford, a professional and accomplished artist.

*The Little Emigrant by Laura Herford (1868)*

One of Laura Herford’s most endearing paintings is her The Little Emigrant which she completed in 1868. It depicts a young girl seated on the deck of a ship, with her head resting on her hands, her right arm on the ship’s railing. She has golden hair, wears a maroon dress with red and white striped neck scarf. The work was painted by Laura after her visit to Auckland and Nelson. The idea of the depiction is believed to be after Laura had listened to an account by a real emigrant to New Zealand on the siling ship, Lord Auckland, when as a child she remembered sitting for days and weeks on the seat that ran round the waist of the ship, under the high bulwarks, looking out over the wide, wide sea. She sat there dreaming of the homeland to which she would never return.

In her twenties Laura Herford was heavily drawn into the argument of the recognition and training of female artists. She signed the 1859 petition to admit women to the Royal Academy. She submitted several drawings to the Academy’s admissions tutors signed “L. Herford“. The use of initials masked her gender, leading to the assumption that she was a man. She was admitted on the merits of these drawings and an offer was made to “L. Herford, Esq” and she took up her place at the Academy in 1860 !!! She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1861 to 1869 and also at the Suffolk Street Gallery and the British Institution. Later, she invited her sister’s daughter, the painter Helen Paterson Allingham, to come live with her in London at the start of her career.

Helen’s mother, Mary was also an artist but gave it up when she married. Helen’s father’s medical practice failed and the family moved out of the small rural community, which Mary never liked, and relocated to Altrincham, Mary’s hometown. Her husband purchased another medical practice in the town. The new practice thrived and soon the family could afford to have a house built in the countryside at Bowden.

Helen Paterson attended the Unitarian boarding school, once attended by her mother and which had been founded by her grandmother, Sarah Smith Herford. In May 1862, when Helen was aged thirteen, tragedy struck her family. Her father battled to treat local victims during a severe diphtheria epidemic. Dr. Paterson succumbed to the disease himself, along with Helen’s three-year-old sister Isabel.

Shortly after the death of the father, the young family moved to Edgbaston, Birmingham where their Paterson aunts helped house and feed them, but money was tight. As time passed, Helen’s artistic talents grew and she enrolled in the Birmingham School of Design. Here for fifteen shillings a term, she studied Drawing, Perspective, Practical Geometry and Painting, three times a week. After three years of study, Helen won the School’s Special Prize, given to her for her outstanding anatomical studies. The School was so impressed with her talent they advised her to apply to the Royal Academy Schools.

*Spring on the Kentish Downs by Helen Allingham*

At age seventeen, Helen secured a place in the Royal Female School of Art in London. A year later, in 1867, she was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy Schools, a door first opened to women by Helen’s aunt Laura just a few years before. The Royal Academy Schools boasted a number of highly thought of masters of the art world who visited and taught the students. Helen Paterson was influenced the most by the lectures and tuition given by Frederick Walker, Sir Frederick Leighton, and Sir John Everett Millais, who was a co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The tuition at the Royal Academy was free, but Helen still needed money to pay for her accommodation and living expenses. With that in mind, she sought work with engraving firms, sketching figures and scenes in black & white, and in 1869 was commissioned by the Once A Week magazine, a weekly illustrated literary magazine to contribute four full-page illustrations. Her work was well received, and this led to more commissions by other periodicals and children’s books while she continued her schooling three days a week.

*Beneath the Cherry Tree by Helen Allingham*

In 1870, twenty-two-year-old Helen was hired as one of the founding staff members, and the only female, on The Graphic, a British high-quality weekly illustrated newspaper, first published in December 1869. During the next three years, commissions to illustrate books and periodicals continued to pour in and by 1872 Helen decided to give up her schooling at the Academy and work as a commercial artist. Some of her most important commissions included illustrations for Thomas Harding’s fourth novel, Far From the Madding Crowd which was first published in 1874.

Two sudden and unexpected deaths in the early 1870’s greatly saddened Helen. In October 1870 she was summoned from her lodgings by William De Morgan who was concerned that his fellow lodger at Fitzroy Square, Laura Herford, had not been seen that day. He knew that Helen was a relative of Laura Herford and so when the two went back and entered Laura’s lodgings they found her lying dead in bed. She had been suffering from constant toothache and be self-medicating with morphine and it was thought that she had died from an accidental overdose. She was thirty-nine-years-old.

*Louisa Paterson by Helen Allingham* *(1871)*

One year later, in November 1871 Helen was summoned home. On returning to the family in Cheshire she was told that her eighteen-year-old sister Louisa was dying of consumption. There was little Helen could do but help the family at this sad time and sit with her sister and help her mother nurse her dying sister. During the times Helen sat at her sister’s bedside she made several pencil sketches of Louisa and one small and emotional watercolour of her.

Now in London and because of her commissions, Helen’s circle of friends grew and she came into contact with prominent writers and artists. One such friend was William Allingham, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine. William Allingham was born on 19 March 19th 1824 in Ballyshannon, a small town in the south of County Donegal in Ulster in the north of Ireland, which is now in the Republic of Ireland. He was the son of the manager of a local bank who was of English descent. When William was nineteen, he became a Customs officer, and he was stationed at different places in Northern Ireland until he was thirty-nine years old. Shortly after he obtained his appointment with the Customs, he made his first trip to London and after that first visit, made many more to the English capital. He would submit many articles to London’s periodicals. He retired from the Civil Service in 1870 and moved to London and sub-editor of Fraser’s Magazine under J. A. Froude, whom he succeeded as editor in 1874. It was also in 1874, on August 22^nd, that Allingham and Helen Paterson were married after the briefest of engagements. He was fifty and she was a month away from her twenty-sixth birthday. William Allingham had developed many good friends in London’s literary and artistic circles such as Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Ruskin, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

*Portrait of William Allingham by Helen Allingham (1874)*

A few months after their marriage, Helen Allingham painted a portrait of her husband.

The newly weds went to live in a house at Trafalgar Square, in the borough of Chelsea, close to William Allingham’s best friend, the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle. Such was their close friendship that William had taken Helen to visit Carlyle before they married, just to make sure Carlyle approved of his choice of wife ! Helen and William became regular visitors to Thomas Carlyle’s home in London and after many preliminary sketches completed a painting of their good friend. Look at how Helen has incorporated all the details of the furnishings of Carlyle’s room.

*The Interior of Thomas Carlyle’s Dining Room by Helen Allingham (1881)*

Helen’s other paintings depicted the interior of Carlyle’s rooms at his residence in Cheyne Row London. It is said that such an accurate depiction of the room aided the National Trust when they came to the restoration of the room.

Married life suited Helen and she no longer had to go out to work. She gave up her position at the Graphic and in a way she had been pleased to have worked at the journal for four years and it had allowed her to regularly send money to her mother. Although working for the Graphic had been advantageous, Helen was pleased to be able to concentrate on her paintings, especially her watercolours and she did manage to do some freelance book illustrations for novels written by her friends, George Elliot, Thoams Hardy and Tennyson.

*A Cottage with Sunflowers at Peaslake by Helen Allingham*

In November 1875 Helen gave birth to her first child, a son, Gerald Carlyle named after her and her husband’s good friend. In February 1877 a second child, a daughter, Eva Margaret, was born. Her third child, a son, Henry William was born in 1882. He was the love of Helen’s life and she would often wear a locket with just his picture inside. In 1874 Helen Allingham had two of her watercolours, The Milkmaid and Wait for Me, exhibited at the Royal Academy and in 1875 she was put forward by the eminent watercolourist, Alfred Hunt, to become an Associate in the Royal Watercolour Society. She was later to become the first woman to be admitted to full membership.

*Harvest Moon by Helen Allingham (1879)*

Her early work tended to feature large figures in a landscape, but later, influenced by their holidays in the country, her style shifted more to smaller figures with emphasis on the rural scene itself. During the seven years the Allinghams lived in London, Helen exhibited more than a hundred watercolours, some depicting her own children as models. During her early days, Helen produced rural depictions featuring large figures. However, in her later paintings she focused on the inanimate and nature itself and any figures depicted were much smaller.

On February 5^th 1881, after a short illness, Helen and William’ close friend, Thomas Carlyle died, aged 85. His death came as a terrible shock to them and now that he was not a close neighbour any more, they felt no reason to stay in the English capital. They decided to move into the country and settled in the small Surrey hamlet of Sandhills. It was from this new base that Helen developed the love of depicting pretty cottages. Sandhills proved to be an idyllic and peaceful resting place for both Helen and William. He was able to spend time writing poetry and Helen passed the hours painting watercolours depicting the rural areas around their home, the numerous pretty flower gardens, her children as they grew up and of course the “chocolate-box” country cottages which were all around where they lived. As the boom of industrial development continued to threaten traditional rural life, Allingham’s paintings captured unblemished landscapes and historic cottage architecture in superb detail. Helen was fervently concerned for the preservation of the English countryside and this love of hers was also held by the viewing public. In 1886 Helen was invited by the Fine Arts Society to hold a one-woman exhibition with the title Surrey Cottages.

*A Cottage near Brook, Witley, Surrey by Helen Allingham*

Helen’s depiction of the old, thatched cottages was not just an act of sentimentality but it was to remind people of what life was like before the railways built their tracks through acres of beautiful land and with the arrival of the railways came the hordes of middle-class families into rural communities. Some bought the cottages and refurbished them while others demolished them and built modern monstrosities. For Helen, the task was to memorialise the beauty and tranquillity of rural life and the exquisiteness of the country cottage which she depicted with such accuracy. She would roam the countryside and paint en plein air the cottages which were marked for demolition. She would add small figures to the scenes and sometimes would substitute thatch rooves to depictions of cottages which had been modernised with man-made materials but at the same time tried to avoid the idealistic depictions.

In 1888, Helen’s husband William became ill with persistent indigestion and the couple decided to move away from the countryside and return to London to be close to family friends. They took up residence in Hampstead in a large home in Eldon Road. William Allingham’s health continued to deteriorate and despite an operation in the Spring of 1889, he died that November, aged 65, leaving Helen, then forty-one, to support herself and three young children, aged fourteen, twelve, and seven. In 1891 Helen and her children travelled to the Irish town of Ballyshannon where their father, William was born and laid to rest. A monument had been erected in honour of their late father and Mary took the opportunity to visit some of his relations. She also painted a number of watercolours of the landscape and the peasant cottages.

In 1890 the Royal Society of Watercolours opened their membership to women, and Helen had the honour of being the first elected into the Society. Helen exhibited her scenic country watercolours every year in London and her depictions of rural cottage scenes grew in popularity. In 1903 Helen collaborated with Marcus B. Huish for a book about English country life titled Happy England, which featured eighty colour plates of Helen’s watercolours.

In 1905 she and her brother, Arthur Paterson, collaborated to produce a book entitled “The Homes of Tennyson” which contained twenty of her paintings. More books followed including editing several books of her late husband’s poetry. Helen continued to paint and exhibit her work. On September 28th, 1926, two days after her seventy-eighth birthday, Helen Allingham died of a acute peritonitis while visiting an old friend at Valewood House in Haslemere, just a few miles from her old country home in Sandhills.

Most of the information for this blog came from the

The Hayllar Family

Having recently looked at the Barnes School, the Williams family of English painters featuring a father and his six sons, I am today looking at another talented English family of painters featuring a father and his four daughters. Let me introduce you to the Hayllars.

James Hayllar, the patriarch.

*James Hayllar, photograph by David Wylkie Wynfield (c.1860’s)*

The patriarch of the Hayllar family was James Hayllar who was born in the West Sussex town of Chichester in 1829. Despite parental opposition he decided to become an artist and, aged thirteen, enrolled at Cary’s Art School in 1842. Francis Stephen Cary, a noted historical painter, who had once taught Rossetti and Millais, had become a pupil at Henry Sass’ Art Academy, and he, on the death of Henry Sass, took over the running of the academy in Bloomsbury and it then became known as Cary’s Art School.

An 1851 pencil and chalk portrait of Stephen Cary by James Hayllar is in London’s National Portrait Gallery.

*Cimabue’s Madonna by Frederic Lord Leighton (1853-1855)*

On completing his studies at Cary’s Art School, Hayllar travelled to Europe and made a tour of the continental countries. In 1851, whilst in Rome he met Frederic Leighton. It is believed that Hayllar appears as one of the figures in Leighton’s monumental (2m x 5m) masterpiece, Cimabue’s Madonna, which he worked on between 1853 and 1855.

*Granville Sharp the abolitionist rescuing a slave from the hands of his master by James Hayllar (1864)*

Granville Sharp, who was born in 1735, was a scholar who campaigned for social justice. In 1787, with his fellow Anglican Thomas Clarkson and a group of Quakers, Sharp founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Sharp supported the resettlement of British and Canadian slaves to Sierra Leone, but despite reports about its moral decline and the resurgence of slave trading in the colony, maintained the view that the project was worthwhile. James Hayllar’s 1864 painting Granville Sharp the abolitionist rescuing a slave from the hands of his master, depicts an event which occurred in 1765 and is based on Sharp’s involvement with the Abolitionist movement. In 1765 Sharp met Jonathan Strong, a slave seeking treatment for injuries sustained at the hands of his owner. Sharp took up Strong’s case and secured his release from prison when he was arrested as an escaped slave. Following this success Sharp began to research the legal status of slaves in Britain and argued on behalf of a number of slaves in court, which is why the background of Hayllar’s painting has the legal setting.

*Miss Lily’s Carriage stops the Way by James Hayllar (1866)*

Hayllar exhibited his work at the Royal Academy focusing on literary and historical genre but by 1866 he changed tack and began a series of extremely well-liked genre studies of children and he completed a three painting series depicting a child attending a formal party. The first of these was Miss Lily’s Carriage stops the Way. In the first painting, Hayllar depicts a young child having her cloak adjusted before she makes an appearance at her first party.

*Miss Lily’s First Flirtation by James Hayllar (1866)*

In the second work, entitled The First Flirtation, we see the same young girl, Lily, enjoying herself at the party as she makes the acquaintance of a young boy similar in age to herself.

*The Return from the Ball by James Hayllar (1866)*

In the third painting entitled The Return from the Ball, Lily is seen being carried from the party by her mother, although her eyes are still open as she rests her head on her mother’s shoulder and we can see that the evening party has tired her out. She still manages to clutch her lace fan in her silk gloved hand.

*Castle Priory Wallingford, home to artist James Hayllar and his daughters,*

The series was well received and his standing as an artist rose. His name was put forward as an Associate of the Royal Academy by William Powell Frith and Eyre Crowe, but he missed being elected by one vote and being very despondent regarding the outcome, never tried again. Having given up hope of becoming an Academician he distanced himself from the Academy circle and also distanced himself from the English capital and London life in general and moved from his St Pancras home and settled down in the rural part of Suffolk at Carlton Rookery near the town of Saxmundham and in 1875 moved to the county of Berkshire and the town of Wallingford where he rented Castle Priory, a large house on the banks of the Thames.

James Hayllar had married Ellen Phoebe Cavell in 1855 and the couple went on to have nine children, five daughters, Jessica Ellen in 1858, Edith Parvin in 1860, Eugenie Grace in 1861, Alexandra Mary in 1862 and Beatrice Kate in 1864. They also had four sons, their first-born child, William Ernest in 1855, Reginald James in 1857 and their two youngest children, Thomas and Algernon in 1866 and 1868.

Both parents and children led an exceptionally happy family life and they often played host to visiting neighbours and cousins. The days were filled with games of tennis as well as artistic endeavour. The house was to provide his family with inspiration for their paintings.

*The Only Daughter by James Hayllar (1875)*

They were a very close family and of course, at a certain age, they would leave home and it is thought that James Hayllar’s 1875 painting entitled The Only Daughter was a reminder to him of the sad day when he “lost” one of his daughters. The painting depicts an only daughter standing between her beloved father and the man who was to be her future husband. His role in the young lady’s life would be to take over the protective mantle, once the role of her father and this successional responsibility is made plain by placing his head between the portraits of past generations on the wall behind him.

Hayller lived at Castle Priory until the death of his wife in 1899. He them went to live in Bournemouth where he stayed until his death in 1920, aged 91.

The daughters of James Hayllar.

Jessica Hayllar

Of the nine children James and Ellen had, five were daughters and it was the female members of the family that followed in the footsteps of their father. James Hayllar and his wife’s third-born child was their first daughter, Jessica.

*Fresh from the Altar by Jessica Hayllar (1890)*

Jessica Hayllar was born on September 16^th 1858. She studied under her father and began to exhibit her art in 1879 and at the Royal Academy from 1880 to 1915. In the early days, up until 1900, her work was mainly depictions of domestic scenes of everyday life at Castle Priory. Her genre scenes were described as being ones which were full of genuine charm. For her models she nearly always used members of her family.

The Hallway with Potted Palms by Jessica Hayler (1882)

In 1900 she was badly injured in a carriage accident and was partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. From that moment the subject of her paintings changed and she started to paint floral still life works which often featured azaleas.

*A Double Pink Azalea by Jessica Hayllar*

Jessica Hayllar lived with her parents throughout her life and never married. When her father left Castle Priory and went to live in Bournemouth she went with him. Following her father’s death in 1920, Jessica moved to Surrey to live with her younger sister Edith Hayllar MacKay.

*A Sunny Corner by Jessica Hayllar (1909)*

Jessica Hayllar died on November 7^th 1940, aged 82.

Alexandra Mary Hayllar

In comparison to her four sisters, Alexandra Mary Hayllar was the least prolific, and unlike her sisters, she only exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1880 to 1885. Her paintings were mainly still life works or genre pieces which featured children.

*Lawn Tennis Season by Mary Hayllar (1881)*

Despite her lesser output of work in comparison to that of her sisters, Mary was extremely gifted and like her sisters, she took pleasure in pictorially depicting the domestic life of the Berkshire countryside, as lived at her parents’ house, Castle Priory, Wallingford

*The Tennis Party by Alexandra Mary Hayller (1907)*

On July 1^st 1885, at the age of twenty-two, she married Henry Wells in St Marys, Wallingford and this change of status coincided with her giving up painting and taking on the accepted role of supportive wife, keeper of the home and bringing up the children. The couple had six children, two sons, Henry and Guy and four daughters, Dora, Muriel, Beatrice and Joyce. All of the children at one time or another modelled for their aunts’ paintings.

*Helping Gardener by Mary Hayllar (1884)*

Alexandra Mary Hayllar died in 1950, aged 87.

Edith Parvin Hayllar

Edith Hayllar was the fourth child and second daughter of the British artist James Hayllar born in 1860. As was the case for most English middle- and upper-class young ladies in Victorian times, art was an essential accomplishment and Edith, like her four sisters, adhered to the Victorian system of four to ten art classes a day by their father and this was to guarantee a proficiency in the basic art techniques such as proportion and perspective. They would also be given instruction in modelling, etching, mezzotint, and engraving among other media.

Once their art lessons were completed, she and her sisters spend the rest of their time at home relaxing, partaking in outdoor sports such as tennis, plein air painting, and even some gardening. This relaxed lifestyle featured in the depiction seen in all the sisters’ paintings

Of the five sisters, Jessica Hayllar and Edith Hayllar where the most well-known painters, and like their father, James, they specialised in genre painting. It is thought that through the depictions in Edith’s paintings of women in domestic interiors with their families gave an insight into their lifestyle. The women in her genre works were observed running a well-organized households and clearly defined a woman’s role at any given time in their lives. Edith had not taken on the role as a spokesperson for female independence and was content with the term “female dependency”

Edith works of art were shown almost every year from the 1880s–1890s at the Institute for Oil Painters and Dudley’s Gallery. In 1881 she had her first piece exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in London and then a year later, in 1882, another of her works was exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts.

Maybe her best-known and best loved painting was her 1883 work entitled A Summer Shower, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition. It depicts a young man with a badminton racket courting a woman who is reclining in a chair next to him. Through the window in the background, we can see the inclement weather has put a stop to all outdoor sporting activities. One critic described the work as one of the most charming genre scenes of the nineteenth century.

In 1900, at the age of forty, Edith married Rev. Bruce MacKay and the couple moved to Sutton Courteney. Marriage also signalled the end of her painting career as she devoted her life to looking after the family household. Edith died in 1948, aged 88.

(Beatrice) Kate Hayllar

(Beatrice) Kate Hayllar was born on September 1st 1864 at 15 Mecklenburgh Square, London. She was the seventh child of James and Ellen Hayllar and the youngest of their five daughters. She, like her other sisters, loved to paint and were tutored by their father. Most of her ideas for her work derived from the happy life she experienced when the family lived at Castle Priory, a large Thames-side house, close to the small town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire. The family resided there from 1875 and 1899. The beautiful interior of Castle Priory, its domestic events held there, the extensive well-laid out gardens, and the nearby countryside inspired the sisters to paint and the flowers they grew became their favourite subjects. Kate Hayllar focused her work on small and intensely observed flower and still life subjects, many of which she exhibited at the Royal Academy and Royal Society of British Artists.

*Souvenirs of Japan by Kate Hayllar (1883)*

When her mother died in 1899 she gave up painting and became a nurse. She moved to Bournemouth with her father and sister Jessica. Later she went to live with her sister Mary at Wallingford, Berkshire.

Eugenie Grace Hayllar

Eugenie Grace Hayllar was born in St Etienne, Ardèche, Rhône-Alpes, France on August 26th 1861. She was the fifth child of James Hayllar and Ellen Phoebe Cavell. Eugenie Grace Hayllar married Robert Fletcher Leslie and the couple had two children, Harry and Charles, born in 1891 and 1893 respectively. Eugenie passed away on March 2nd 1943 in Wallingford, Berkshire, England. Her husband had died the year before.

I was unable to find any paintings attributed to her but we know that like her sisters she was taught to paint by her father.

The Barnes School (Part 4)

The children

Sidney Richard Percy and Alfred Walter Williams

Sidney Richard Percy

The fifth son of Edward and Ann Williams was Sidney Richard Percy Williams. He was born on March 22^nd 1822 in London. His eldest brother, Edward Charles was fourteen years old when Sidney was born. Once again, like his brothers before him, he was taught to paint by his father and he never received any formal training.

*Llanberis, North Wales, by Sidney Richard Percy* (*1871*)

His childhood years were spent in or near the artist’s quarter of Tottenham Court and Brunswick Square. In 1846 he moved to his father’s house at 32 Castelnau in the London suburb of Barnes. It was here that he lived and worked with his father and his older brothers in a communal artist setting within the large house which had a studio which the father and sons shared. Although Castelnau is a built-up metropolitan area now, at the time of the William’s family living there, it was at the heart of a rural countryside area, close to the River Thames. It was an area of marshland and windmills with many small farms, ploughed fields and countryside inns. It was an ideal area for budding landscape painters such as the Williams family.

*Llyn-y-Ddinas, North Walesby Sidney Richard Percy* (*1873)*

Sidney signed his early works of art Sidney Williams but from the age of twenty he signed his name Sidney Percy so as to set himself aside from his brothers and their paintings. His elder brothers Henry (Boddington) and Arthur (Gilbert) had also changed how they signed their work for the same reason. From 1842, his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery of the Society of British Artists. He also exhibited in many of the lesser-known Victorian art venues.

Rest on the Roadside by Sidney Richard Percy (1861)

Sidney was also an avid amateur photographer, and some of his paintings show figures based on photographs that he took of gypsies frequenting the area around Barnes and Wimbledon Commons. One such painting is his 1861 work entitled Rest on the Roadside.

Left: *Detail from the painting.* Right: *Photo by Sidney Richard Percy*

Although the painting seems to be a simple en plein air depiction of the two gypsies, the photograph which is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum collection states on its website that it may have been staged, rather than taken in an actual countryside setting, and in fact the characters in the depiction are household servants dressed up to look like gypsies. Photographs still survive that Sidney took at home of various family members. He also took pictures of views of fishing boats and old buildings, many of which he used for his paintings.

Sidney with his wife Charlotte and their first child, Gordon Fairlam Percy Williams (1858)

Edward Williams, the family patriarch died in 1855 and two years later, Sidney married Emily Charlotte Fairlam, one of the younger children of a large family of seven, on June 10th, 1857 in the Barnes Parish Church. He signed his name as Sidney Richard Percy Williams on his marriage certificate although he was known to the public and appears in the census records and exhibition catalogues, as Sidney Richard Percy.

*Mountain Pass by Sidney Richard Perry (1872)*

Once Sidney had married he left the home he had shared with his family at 32 Castelnau and moved with his wife to Florence Villa on Inner Park Road in nearby Wimbledon, Surrey. It was said to be a substantial house on an acre and half of land, with coach house and servants quarters. He and Emily remained there for four years during which time his wife gave birth to their four children. The first born child was Gordon Fairlam Percy Williams who was born on April 12^th, 1858. Their daughter Edith Maude Percy Williams came next on April 14^th 1859 and their third child, another daughter, Amy Dora was born on October 6th 1860. Sidney Percy’s art had been selling well and the family finances were extremely good. Whether it was their newly-found wealth or the fact that their family was expanding, Sidney’s wife decided they needed to move to a larger home and so in 1863, the year that their fourth child, Herbert, was born, the family moved to Hill House in the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

*Hill House, Great Missenden, where Sidney Richard Percy lived from 1863 to around.1872, and where Herbert Sidney Percy was born.*

Hill House was a large, three-storey building complete with cellar and servants quarters. It was situated in a position which boasted beautiful views across the Misbourne Valley and was an ideal starting point for sketching and painting trips into the nearby countryside. Sidney did not restrict his painting forays to the nearby countryside as he travelled extensively throughout Britain, visiting Northern Wales, Devon, Yorkshire, the Lake District and Skye continually pictorially recording the beautiful landscapes. He also travelled to Venice in 1865 along with his friend and neighbour, the watercolour artist, William Callow. The painting trip was brought to an abrupt end in 1866 when war broke out between Prussia and Austria, and Sidney was compelled to return to Hill House and to concentrate his painting trips to North Wales in and around the villages of Llanbedr and Arthog.

*Cattle and Sheep in a Scottish Highland Landscape by Sidney Richard Perry (1851)*

There was a downturn in the popularity of landscape art with the buying public and landscape artists found it difficult to sell their paintings. Sidney suffered from this downturn in the popularity of his work in the 1870’s and the family income waned to such an extent that he and his wife could no longer live in the lap of luxury at Hill House and had to downsize in 1873 for a more modest residence in Redhill, Surrey. They remained there until 1879 when they made their final house move to Woodseat, Mulgrave Road, in the London borough of Sutton.

*On the Thames, Medmenham by Sidney Richard Perry (1847)*

Sidney suffered a horse riding accident in the 1880’s and badly injured his knee when he was thrown from his horse. The injury proved to be so serious that he had to have his leg amputated. Sidney Richard Percy Williams died at home on April 13^th 1886, aged 64, due to complications from the operation. Sidney’s finances had been excellent in the 1870’s but at the time of his death they had deteriorated so much that at the end of 1886, his widow was forced to auction off his remaining works to try and boost her meagre inheritance. However, Emily had to be supported in her final years by her Quaker son-in-law Fred Reynolds, the husband of their daughter, Amy Dora. Sidney’s widow Emily died in 1904. Sidney Richard Perry and his wife Emily Charlotte are buried at the Beckenham Cemetery on Elmers End Road, which is located in the Beckenham parish on the outskirts of London.

Alfred Walter Williams

Alfred Walter Williams and his identical twin, Charles, were born on July 18^th 1824 in Southwark, London. Sadly, the second twin died a few days after birth. Alfred was the sixth son of the painter Edward Williams and Ann Hildebrandt and a member of the Williams family of painters, who also had family connections to such famous artists as James Ward, R.A. and George Morland. Alfred, who like his older brothers, was taught by his father and being the youngest also received artistic tuition from his siblings.

*The Rescue by Albert Walter Williams (1859)*

Alfred’s first work to be accepted by the Royal Academy was in 1843 and following that breakthrough he regularly exhibited there until 1890. Alfred also exhibited his work at the Society of British Artists’ exhibitions. That illustrious society was renamed the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887.

*The Castle of Ischia, off the Coast of Naples, Italy by Alfred Walter Williams (1865)*

Alfred with his family had moved into a large Surrey home at 32 Castelnau, Barnes in 1846. It was a large residence with a spacious coach house which was converted into a studio for the whole family.

*Playing Football Outside the Gun Inn by Alfred Walter Williams (1844)*

Alfred was very close to his brother Sidney Richard Percy. Sidney married Emily Fairlam in 1857 and left the family home at Castelnau and moved to Florence Villa, Wimbledon with their children. Alfred boarded with them for a couple of years. In 1860 he rented accommodation from Mr and Mrs Fitzsimon in their Westgate Street home in Reigate. In 1870 he was on the move again, this time he went to Mead Vale in the Surrey town of Redhill.

*Off Hastings, Sunrise by Alfred Walter Williams (1885*)

On August 13^th 1888, sixty-four year-old Alfred married his housekeeper, Ann Hutchence, who had been widowed since her husband died in 1862. Ann was ten years younger than Alfred and not only did Alfred gain a wife but he became stepfather to Ann’s two daughter, Rosie who was twenty-eight at the time her mother re-married and Ada who was two years younger. There is no record of Alfred and Ann having any children.

*Cornfield with Reapers by Alfred Walter Williams (1864)*

Alfred and his family remained in their Mead Vale home until 1895 when they moved to 40 Croydon Road in Reigate, which was close to his older brother Arthur Gilbert, who lived on Canterbury Road in West Croydon. Alas, Arthur died that same year.

*The River Mole, Bletchworth, Surrey* *by Alfred Walter Williams.*

Alfred Walter Williams died on December 16th, 1905 in the Croydon area of South London. His wife is thought to have died around 1921. Alfred and his wife are both buried in the Mitcham Road Cemetery in Croydon, Surrey.

*Welsh Hillside Farmers Dragging Bracken by Alfred Walter Williams*

Alfred Walter Williams produced grand and romantic landscapes in the best tradition of the Williams family, which through their popularity became the most successful Victorian family of painters.

Most of the information I have found for these blogs about the Barnes School came from the excellent website of Mike Clark, entitled Genealogy of the Percy, Williams and Ward families. If you would like to read an in-depth account of the Williams family, this is a must-read.

The Barnes School (Part 3)

The Children: George Augustus Williams and Arthur Gilbert Frederick Williams

George Augustus Williams

The third son of Edward and Ann Williams was George Augustus Williams who was born in London on May 4^th 1814. He was one of the more prolific landscape painters of the Williams family. Again, like his brothers, the only artistic tuition he received was from his father. His work is distinct from that of the other family members as he preferred to paint depictions of riverscapes of the Thames, moonlit landscapes, seascapes and views of Kent, Wales and elsewhere. His work was characterized by moonlight and twilight winter scenes of villages and stables, often with horses and a light dusting of snow.

George was still young when he married Caroline Smith on February 19^th 1834 at St. Pancras Church in Camden, London. It was a double wedding, in which Caroline’s sister Charlotte Matilda Smith also married her fiancé Edward Joseph Brett. By 1841 George and his wife had a family of three sons, Walter, Francis, and Frederick and a daughter, Caroline. The 1841 census shows that George and Caroline were living with their family on London Street in St. Mary Islington in the central part of London, next door to his brother Edward Charles Williams. The family moved around 1844 to Liverpool Street in the Bishopsgate District of London.

*Windsor Castle from the Thames by George Augustus Williams*

In 1846, the family had once again moved, this time to Barnes and lived in a house that had sight of the Thames, which was a favourite subject for Augustus Williams’ paintings. His paintings were primarily exhibited at the Suffolk Street Gallery, the home of the Society of British Artists but he also exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1841 onwards, and at many other galleries.

*Early Morning near Gravesend by George Augustus Williams*

In 1846 George, Caroline and their family were living with his father at No. 32 Castelnau Villas in Barnes, which at that time was a rural area near the Thames River on the outskirts of London. George continued to live there until the death of his father in 1855. He then moved his family a short distance to another house at No. 4 Castelnau Cottages.

*Farmyard in Snow by George Augustus Williams*

There is, however, somewhat of a mystery as to what happened to George’s wife Caroline as she seems to have disappeared from living at Castelnau Villas from any census records after 1851. It is possible that she left her husband, although in Jan Reynolds 1975 book, The Williams Family of Painters, she said that she believed Caroline had died.

*A Snowy Evening near Nutfield, Kent by George Augustus Williams*

George continued to give No. 32 Castelnau as his address in various documents until 1855, which is the year his father died. George then at some point soon after moved to another house on the same road, No. 4 Castelnau Cottages, which is very close to his late father’s house. We know for sure that he was in the new house by the time the U.K. Census for 1861 was taken. As I said before, nothing is known for sure about Caroline’s status or whereabouts during these years at the Castelnau houses, and she was definitely out George’s life by 1854 when he appears with a new wife and a new child.

*A Break in the Clouds* *by George Augustus Williams*

George’s fifth child Albert Williams was born on August 26, 1854. The mother of the child was George’s second wife, Jane Newman, and they were shown on birth and baptism records as Albert’s parents. However, there is no official record of the marriage between George and Jane. Sadly, Jane died of tuberculosis on February 3rd, 1855 at the Castelnau Villas, less than five months after the birth of Albert. She was buried at the age of 27 on February 10th, 1855 in the Barnes parish, which indicates that she almost certainly is buried in the Old Barnes Cemetery.

*The Trespassers by George Augustus Williams*

Albert Williams was baptized on March 15, 1855 at the Barnes, St. Mary parish church, about three weeks after his mother’s burial. He died the next day on March 16 1855 in Castelnau, Barnes, and as his name appears in the burial register of the Barnes parish church, he is almost certainly buried with his parents in the Old Barnes Cemetery

*The Thames at Shiplake by George Augustus Williams*

In the 1861 U.K. census, George Augustus Williams now listed as a widow, was sharing a household with his daughter Caroline, who never married. George and Caroline were then joined around 1877 by George’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Maud Marion Williams, who was the daughter of George’s late son, Frederick Williams, and stayed with them for the rest of their lives.

*A Fisherboy with his Dog Bringing Home the Catch by George Augustus Williams*

George died on May 26th, 1901, aged 87, at his home at Castelnau Villas, having lived in the same neighbourhood for more than fifty years. He is buried in the Old Barnes Cemetery in the grave of his father, and near his brother Henry John Boddington.

Arthur Gilbert Frederick William

Arthur Gilbert Frederick Williams was born on December 19th, 1819 at Newington Butts Road in Southeast London. He was the fourth of six sons of Edward Williams and his wife Anne Hildebrandt. Again, like his brothers before him, he was initially tutored in art by his father but also by his older siblings. He, like his brother Henry (Boddington) Williams, attempted to distinguish himself from the other members of his family by avoiding the use of his surname, and instead signing his works, Arthur Gilbert. His works often focused on depictions of moonlit night scenes, and stark mountain landscapes uncluttered by trees or people.

*Cader Idris from the River Mawr by Arthur Gilbert*

When Arthur was twenty-three, he married his first wife Elizabeth Jane Williams on January 23rd, 1843 at St. Martin in the Fields in London. She was three years older than her husband. Although both had the same surname, there is no indication that they were in any way related.

*On the Thames by Arthur Gilbert (1848)*

Their daughter Kate was born later that year, on December 17^th and the following year, 1844, Arthur was baptized with his daughter Kate on Sept. 9th at the Old St. Pancras Church, the same church where his parents had been married. Elizabeth died after contracting tuberculosis on August 29th, 1849, and she was buried on September 5th, 1849 in Hammersmith. Arthur was now left to look after his five-year-old daughter. Five years later, Arthur married his second wife, Sarah on June 28th, 1854 at the Barnes parish church. Sarah, whose father was a lawyer, was ten years older than Arthur. Arthur and Sarah had a son Horace Walter Gilbert who was born on April 6^th 1855.

Arthur Gilbert lived at different homes in the London districts of Weybridge and Hammersmith, but he lived for seventeen years at Lonsdale Terrace in Barnes, close to his brothers at the Castelnau Villas. Arthur and Sarah moved to Redhill, Surrey with their family in 1873, and the following year he was on the move again, this time to Surrey and a large house, De Tillens, in the town of Limpsfield, Surrey. Arthur Gilbert Fredrick Williams died on April 21, 1895, aged 75, in Croydon, Surrey, near the home of his brother Alfred. It is believed that his wife, Sarah, died around the same time. It is thought that Arthur and Sarah were buried at the Queen’s Road Cemetery in Croydon, which is located only a couple of miles from where Arthur Gilbert died.

*Gilter’s Point, Tenby, by Moonlight, by Arthur Gilbert (c.1873)*

Friends described Arthur as of a shy and retiring nature. He was a devoted family man, but completely engaged in his work as a painter. He had an exceptional inherent flair for painting and was always fascinated with the beauty of the English countryside, which he was masterful when it came to transferring what he saw onto canvas in a crisp, colourful manner, whether it be the meadows, gently flowing rivers, verdant trees or the rustic farmsteads, and delightfully contrasted the lush greens with red-roofed barns and thatched cottages. Arthur Gilbert was equally proficient at painting farm workers, grazing sheep, horses at work and cattle idly drinking water in high Summer or in the glow of Autumn. He painted en plein air and lovingly transferred his love and kinship with the countryside into his artwork.

One example of this is his highly gifted 1844 work entitled The Bell Inn, Arthur Gilbert which depicts a rustic village inn, nestling under a canopy of trees, a wooden bridge crossing the shallow river, with sunlight illuminating the path. We observe a man on horseback who has paused for a drink at the inn. Another man fishes from the bridge, and a flock of sheep head for the fields, following a horse and cart. It is a tranquil depiction, the likes of which were popular with the public who wanted to remember the gentle serenity, peace and of a time long gone by.

Most of the information I have found for these blogs about the Barnes School came from the excellent website of Mike Clark, entitled Genealogy of the Percy, Williams and Ward families. If you would like to read an in-depth account of the Williams family, this is a must-read.

The Barnes School (Part 2)

The Children (Part 1)

Edward Charles Williams and Henry John Boddington

Edward Charles Williams

A year after Edward Williams and Ann Hilderbrandt married, she gave birth on July 10^th 1807 to their first child, a boy, who was christened Edward Charles at St Mary’s Church in the St. Marylebone parish of Westminster. When he was still a child Edward Charles was taught to paint by his father and in years to come their styles were so similar it was difficult to detect the artist of some of their works, especially their woodland scenes.

*The Old Roadside Inn by Edward Charles Williams (1859*)

As neither father nor son consistently signed their works, it can be very difficult to ascertain which one painted a given canvas. To complicate things even further Edward Charles Williams signed some of his paintings E Williams, which led to confusion with paintings by his father, and at other times he would sign his work C Williams. Like his father’s love of the work by the Dutch Golden Age landscape painters, his son was greatly influenced by those Dutch masters.

*A Shady Lane by Edward Charles Williams (1856)*

Edward Charles spent most of his life living around London and often his paintings depicted the countryside of the counties surrounding the capital such as Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex. On December 11th 1839, when Edward was thirty-two, he married Mary Ann Challenger at the St Marylebone Church in Westminster.

*A Dutch Canal by Edward Charles Williams*

In the early 1840’s he was living at 2, London Street which was close to the homes of two well-known Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. He exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy in 1840 entitled A Gypsy Encampment, Moon Rising.

*The Travelling Organ Grinder by Edward Charles Williams*

By 1854 he had moved to Hammersmith. Edward and Ann’s marriage lasted until his wife’s death in 1857. The Barnes parish church Burial Register records her as being buried on March 13^th 1857, a week after her death at the age of 49, and it is probable that she was laid to rest with other members of the family in the Old Barnes Cemetery. The couple were childless.

*Near Dorking, Surrey by Edward Charles Williams*

Edward Charles Williams was the least prolific exhibitor of the Williams family as he had almost given up painting after the death of his first wife, Ann.. It was thought that her death led to him suffering a mental breakdown. However, he did exhibit some of his work at all the major exhibition halls, including: The Royal Academy, British Institution, Royal Society of British Artists, Institute of Fine Arts and the National Institution.

Edwards’ first wife had been an invalid for many years and had required a live-in nurse. The nurse was Sarah Susannah Horley, the daughter of a pawnbroker, William Horley. A year after the death of Edward Charles’ wife, Ann, Sarah gave birth to his child, Alice. Edward, Sarah and Alice lived together almost ten years before Edward and Ann were married on October 3^rd 1868 at the St. Pancras Old Church in Camden, London. She was the thirty-years-old and Edward Charles was sixty-one.

*The Sportsman by Edward Charles Williams*

Edward Charles Williams saw his fortunes decline in his later years but it was said that he died “in respectable poverty” on July 25th, 1881 in Shepherds Bush, London. He had just celebrated his seventy-fourth birthday a fortnight before his death.

*A Summer Evening by Edward Charles Williams*

Edward Chales Williams was buried in the Old Hammersmith (Margravine) Cemetery, only a couple of miles from his family home. Sarah, who had been born Feb. 26th, 1838 in the Finsbury district of London, outlived him by more than fifty years, and died on Feb. 10th, 1933 in Hammersmith. She is also buried at the Margravine Cemetery, in the same plot as her husband and their daughter.

Henry John Boddington

Edward Williams and Ann Hilderbrandt’s second-born child was a son, Henry John Williams. He was born on October 14^th 1811 in London. Like his elder brother, Edward Charles, he was taught to paint by his father and he was also tutored by his older brother but other than that, he received no formal instruction. On November 28th 1833, at the age of twenty-two, Henry married Clarissa (Clara) Eliza Boddington in the St. Pancras Church in Camden, London. It was then that Henry decided to adopt his wife’s maiden name and was. from then on, known as Henry John Boddington so that his artwork was not confused with that of other members of his artistic family. Henry and Clarissa had one child, Edwin Henry Boddington, who was born on October 14th 1836, and who would also become a well-known painter.

For many years after marriage Henry struggled to make ends meet and the family lived in great poverty but despite this, he continued to believe in himself as a painter and by 1840 he had become a prosperous and well-respected artist. He then enjoyed considerable success as there was an enthusiastic market amongst the emerging wealthy class, who were furnishing their grand city homes with scenes of the countryside that they had left behind, and wished to be reminded of.

*Outside the Cottage by Henry John Boddington (1856)*

Boddington had showed an early talent for painting and he quickly developed his own distinct style which was categorised by his treatment of blocked light as it seeped through an archway of trees. Like his brothers, Henry was known for his delightful depiction of trees, with their twisting branches and rich foliage set under glorious skies, with large white clouds illuminated from behind with a soft sunlight.

*A Wooded Lane, Otford, Kent by Henry John Boddington*

In Jan Reynolds’ 1975 book, The Williams Family of Painters, she writes about Henry Boddington’s painting style:

“…most characteristic effect is the appearance of a warm day, with the sun just out of the picture, giving a filmy, hazy atmosphere to the landscape, with deep blue shadows adding greater value to the opposing tone of yellow. The distant mountains are melting in vapory sunlight. The artist is a master of this effect…”

Henry Boddington liked to paint large canvases which allowed him to encapsulate the grandiose beauty of the English countryside. In an article in the 1865 Fine Arts Quarterly Review it noted that Boddington was:

“…an artist who, if he fell into mannerism, had yet during a hard working life, painted pictures not only large, but sometimes grand. His landscapes of mountains, lake and river had scenic breadth and power…”

*Eel Traps on the Ouse by Henry John Boddington*

The famous art critic John Ruskin praised his pictures for their honesty and true love of the countryside. One such painting illustrates this quality. It is his painting Eel Traps on the Ouse. This charming scene, which is set on the banks of the River Ouse, depicts a couple of children watching a man, as he skilfully creates a new eel pot from reeds, for his eel trap.

Henry had built up a reputation as being a talented painter of woodland and village scenes and in 1842, at the age of 31, he became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. Many other artists had exhibited with the Society, but few had been accepted as a member, in fact Henry Boddington was the only member of his family to achieve this honour which carried with it definite status and responsibility.

Henry and his wife initially lived in the north central London district of Pentonville before moving to Hammersmith a western district of London. Their final move was in 1854 when they relocated to the Surrey town of Barnes. Many of his early paintings depicted the scenery of Surrey and the banks of the Thames.

*Loch Ericht by Henry John Boddington (1857)*

Henry first exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1837, and then from 1839 onwards one or two of his pictures were always on display. As well as showing at the Academy, many of his works were exhibited at the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. In 1842 Henry became a member of the Society of British Artists, and from then on exhibited an average of ten pictures a year until his death.

*A Trout Stream, North Wales by Henry John Boddington*

Henry travelled around Britain sketching and painting. In 1843 he visited Devonshire, staying at Ashburton; in 1846 the English Lake District; and in 1847, for the first time, North Wales, which, especially the country around Betws-Y-Coed and Dolgellau, became his favourite place for his landscape work. Boddington also painted in Scotland, Yorkshire, and other parts of England, but strangely, he never travelled to the European continent.

*A Path through the Woods by Henry John Boddington (1851)*

A fellow member of the Royal Society of British Artists was John Frederick Herring, Sr, who, along with Landseer, had become one of the more eminent animal painters of mid-nineteenth century. He collaborated with Henry Boddington by painting horses and animals into Henry’s prepared landscape.

After suffering for several years from a progressive disease of the brain, thought to have been a brain tumour, which eventually robbed him of his sight, he died at his home in Barnes on 11 April 1865, aged 54. Henry Boddington was buried in the Old Barnes Cemetery, next to his father’s grave, under his given name of Williams. Following her husband’s death, his wife Clara adopted his name after his death, and became known as Clarissa Eliza Boddington-Williams. She died at the age of 92 of complications from a fall on March 21st, 1905 at Upper Holloway in London, some forty years after the passing of her husband.

………….to be continued.

The Barnes School

The Patriarch, Old Williams.

When I came across the words “Barnes School” in connection with art, I immediately thought it was referring to an artistic colony or a type of painting but I was wrong, albeit the name derived from the then rural town of Barnes, a district in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, where a talented artistic family had their painting studio. The name referred to a nineteenth century family of gifted Victorian landscape painters who pictorially depicted the British countryside. The head of this family of artists was Edward Williams. In this and the next three blogs I will be looking at the life and work of the talented patriarch and his six sons

Edward Williams was born some time in 1781 as baptismal records show him as being baptised on October 13th 1781 at St. Mary’s Church in the London borough of Lambeth. Edward was the son of Edward Williams, an engraver and Mary Ward. Mary came from a large artistic family. She was a sister of James Ward the well-known animal painter, and a sister of the equally well-known engraver, William Ward. Mary was also a sister-in-law of the talented figure painter George Morland, and a sister-in-law of Henry Chalon, another animal painter. The family history recounts that around 1793 Edward Williams’ mother left his father for another man, and their son Edward was sent to live with his maternal uncle, James Ward the painter. Ward was one of the outstanding artists of the day and was regarded as one of the great animal painters of his time. It is not recorded as to whether Ward ever gave his young nephew any artistic training but there is no doubt that Edward must have been influenced by his brief association with Ward.

*A Cottage in a Wooded Landscape by Edward Williams*

After staying with Ward for a short period Edward Williams took up an apprenticeship with a carver and gilder named Thomas Hillier, who was not in any of the trade guilds but nonetheless had a shop on Silver Street, Golden Square, London. It was probable that Edward began his career carving and gilding picture frames, but it is also known that to support himself financially he painted and sold miniatures.

*River Landscape with Windsor Castle* *by Edward Williams*

Edward married Ann Hildebrant, who was the daughter of Frederick and Sarah Hildebrant, on February 12th, 1806 at St. Pancras Church in London. Ann was twenty-five and Edward was a year younger. Although Edward Williams’ profession was as a carver and gilder he was amongst relatives who were all well-known painters and engravers, and consequently, as time passed, Edward re-invented himself as a painter.

*The Jewish Cemetery by van Ruisdael (c.1655)*

His initial delving into the world of art was when he started to copy well known landscape paintings of the Dutch Baroque era of the 1600’s, such as those by Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema.

*The Old Watermill by George Morland (1790)*

Following this phase in his artistic career, he concentrated on copying works by contemporary landscape painters, such as his uncle, George Morland. Edward took the decision to become a landscape painter which was a risky choice as landscape art was, at the time, considered to be an inferior genre.

Edward Williams became known for his moonlight scenes. Edward Williams often shared art exhibition venues with his sons, causing some confusion with the public who had trouble telling one Williams painting from another. He is often called “Old Williams” to distinguish him from his oldest son, and he is referred to in some of the art journals of the time as “Moonight Williams”, as moonlit scenes of the Thames were one of his favourite subjects in his paintings

*A View on the Banks of the Thames by Edward Williams*

As he got older, for river scenes along the Thames.

Edward and his wife Ann Hildebrandt had married in February 1806 and went on to have eight children. The first-born was Edward Charles Williams who was born on July 10^th 1807 and because he had been given the same name as his father, Edward Williams, his father became known in his later years as “Old Williams” to distinguish himself from his eldest son . Two more sons followed, Henry John Boddington Williams in October 1811, George Augustus Williams in May 1814. Then followed the Williams’ only daughter, Emily Anne Williams who was born in June 1816. Arthur Gilbert Frederick Williams arrived in December 1819 followed by Sidney Richard Percy Williams in March 1822. Identical twin boys Alfred Walter Williams and Charles Williams were the final additions to the Williams family in July 1824. Sadly, Charles Williams died shortly after birth.

*Crossing the Stream, A Wayside Chat by Edward Williams*

Edward and his wife Ann lived in various residences, in what is now termed the West End of London, in Percy Street, Foley Street, and Charlotte Street. In 1827 the family moved to Cromer Street in the St Pancras area where they stayed for almost twenty years. By 1846 with the continuous sale of the father and sons’ paintings, the family’s finances had improved. Add to that fact the family had grown, they needed a larger residence and so moved to 32 Castelnau Villas, Barnes. Edward Williams spent his final years there with his wife Ann. She died, aged 71, and was buried on September 24th, 1851 at the Barnes Parish Church. Old Williams was overcome with the grief from the death of his wife and he died just four years later at the age of 74 on June 24th, 1855 at his Castelnau Villa house. He along with his wife now rest in the Old Barnes Cemetery. Sadly, the cemetery has been turned into a nature sanctuary by the city council and the graveyard has fallen into disrepair and is overgrown with bushes and vines.

……………..to be continued.