^
Died on 11 February 1921: William
Blake Richmond, English painter born in 1842 (or 1843?).
— Richmond was born in London, the son of a painter and Academician.
His father was a great admirer of William Blake, the visionary, painter,
and poet, hence naming his son in his honor. Richmond entered the RA Schools
in 1858, where he was a contemporary and friend of Albert Moore.
He was an accomplished portraitist, and throughout
his life he had a considerable output of portraits of ’the great and the
good.’ Like many other serious minded Victorian artists, he was not comfortable
with being ‘merely’ a portrait painter. He traveled to Italy, therefore,
to study great works of the Old Masters. Richmond painted large scale classical
pictures following this visit. These works show the influence of Lord Leighton,
in their high degree of finish, and father static nature. He was elected
a Royal Academician in 1895. He lived well into the 20th century, when his
art was deeply unfashionable.
— Richmond was born in London, the son of the painter George Richmond
RA, a devotee of William Blake, who named his son after the artist. Richmond
received a classical education, learning Latin and Greek, and also came
under the instruction of John Ruskin, a friend of George Richmond. He entered
the RA Schools in 1858 and was a keen student of drawing from the Antique.
He was, however, dissatisfied with the teaching and left shortly afterwards.
In 1859 he made his first visit to Italy, where he copied Giotto's frescoes
in the Arena Chapel, Padua, and was influenced by the rich colors of Titian
in Venice.
Richmond's first RA exhibit in 1861 was a
portrait group of his brothers, and portraiture continued to be a major
part of his work throughout his life. His sitters included Darwin, Holman
Hunt, Gladstone and Browning. Richmond was determined, however, to paint
not only portraits, and therefore decided to return to Italy for a few years
and also visited Algiers in 1870. Richmond began to paint high art subjects
on a monumental scale and was also commissioned to paint frescoes and design
mosaics for the ceiling of Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1891-4. Visits to Greece
in 1882 and 1883 resulted in several epic classical works such as Venus
and Anchises (1890) which combined classical forms and swirling drapery
with minute attention to the details of plants and flowers. He was elected
ARA 1888 and RA 1895.
— Sir William Blake Richmond, KCB RA, died on Friday 11 February 1921
at his home, Beavor Lodge, Hammersmith, aged 78. If heredity counts for
anything in art, Sir William Richmond had every claim to be an artist, for
not only was he the son of the distinguished portrait painter George
Richmond RA [28 Mar 1809 – 19 Mar 1896], he was the grandson of
Thomas Richmond, a prolific and successful miniature painter, whilst his
grandmother was the daughter of George
Engleheart [1750-1829], the contemporary and rival of Conway.
He was born in London in 1843 (or 1842?),
and partly for reasons of health was educated privately; which as his parents
were highly cultivated people and their house a center of artistic society,
rather of the imaginative and even mystical type, meant that the boy was
bred upon art and music. The household friends were men like Samuel Palmer
and Edward Calvert, while over them all brooded the memory of William Blake,
to walk with whom George Richmond used to say ‘was like walking with the
Prophet Isaiah.
After the friend of his father William Blake
Richmond was named. In early boyhood he had a passion for music, but before
he was 14 he had turned to drawing and entered the RA Schools. At this date
he was much influenced by the group of Pre-Raphaelites, men several years
older than himself and already coming to the front — Holman Hunt, Millais,
and Burne-Jones — and perhaps still more by their great literary advocate
John Ruskin.
Partly stimulated by them, and partly by
a first visit to Italy, he painted several pictures, chiefly illustrating
poetical or classical legend, or Bible stories a class of work he preferred
above all others, even when he had become, in the sixties and seventies,
a favorite portrait painter.
The pictures at which he worked hardest,
and into which he put most of himself shown to the end of the century were
such as The Death of Ulysses, The Song of Miriam, and best of all
An Audience at Athens during the performance of Agamenmon.
Several of the portraits are greatly admired,
especially the Lady Hood, and the Andrew Long, and the
beautiful Three Daughters of Dean Liddell, a work of about 1870.
The picture of Long in particular is admirable, not only for its design
and execution, but for its grasp of character.
Richmond had many sitters amongst eminent
men; Gladstone sat to him twice; he painted Darwin and Browning; and, in
1887, he went to Berlin and painted Prince Bismarck.
At a later stage he was given the formidable
commission to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and to this work for many
years he gave his utmost energies. There were many who thought it a mistake
to attempt such a colossal undertaking, seeing that it is quite uncertain
that Wren ever contemplated anything of the kind for his great church, and
seeing that mosaic decoration has never taken root in England, but Richmond
was courageous enough to make the effort, filled as he was with Italian
memories and Italian ideas. The work so far as it has gone, has been as
much attacked as praised.
Richmond’s solid reputation will rest rather
on his portraits, often beautiful and always full of the truth of character,
and upon some at least of his large ‘historical,’ or rather ideal pictures,
of which The Audience at Athens has the most enduring merit.
Sir William Richmond, who had known and loved
Assisi well since 1868, when he spent a summer in that city, published in
1919 Assisi Impressions of Half A Century. In this book recollections
of blissful days with his paint-box among the kindly friars and genial farm
folk, mingle with his discourse on the upper and lower churches, and the
hills and valleys of the neighborhood. A number of his own sketches reproduced
in color, illustrate many of his reminiscences.
— LINKS
— Henry
Dawson Greene (1862-1912) of Slyne and Whittington Hall
[Child, Dog, Flowers] (76x122cm)
— The
Watchers (1876, 31x61cm) [three sleepy angels sitting around a mummified
body]
— Sleep
and Death Carrying the Body of Sarpedon into Lycia (1876)
To two swift bearers give him then in charge / To Sleep and Death, twin
brothers, in their arms / To bear him safe to Lycia's wide-spread plains:
/ There shall his brethren and his friends perform / His funeral rites,
and mound and column raise, / The fitting tribute to the mighty dead.' (Homer,
Iliad, XVI)
— Electra
at the Tomb of Agamemnon Date painted: 1877 _ Electra was the daughter
of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Her name (which may once have meant 'fire'
or spark') refers to amber.
— Orpheus
returning from the Shades (18850 _ This was Richmond's Diploma Work
for the Royal Academy.
— Joan
of Arc
— Icarus
(1887)
— Venus
and Anchises (1889) Also known as 'Athwart the Wintry Wilderness of
Thorns'.
— (The
Reading Lesson) [A woman sits holding an open book on her lap. A girl
at her left looks into the book. A girl at her right looks away]
— The
Bath of Venus (1891) |
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