Frederick Appleyard was born in Middlesborough on 9 September 1874. He was the son of Isaac Appleyard, an iron-merchant. Having received his formal education at Scarborough, Fred won a scholarship to the Scarborough School of Art, where he studied under the genre and landscape painter Albert Strange. He then proceeded to the National Art Training School at South Kensington and from there to the Royal Academy Schools, which he entered on 27 July 1897, on the recommendation of John Sparkes. There, he was awarded the Turner Gold Medal, the Creswick Prize for landscape, the Landseer Scholarship and others. Commissioned by the president and council, in 1903 he painted the mural Spring driving out Winter over the doorway of what is now the Royal Academy Restaurant at Burlington House in London. On 12 December 1934, the RA Secretary, Sir Walter Lamb wrote to Appleyard to ask if he would mind if the mural was painted over, as it was ‘rather dark in tone and not in accord with modern ideas of mural decoration’. Unfortunately, Appleyard’s response is not recorded, but the survival of the painting in situ would suggest that he rebuffed the proposal. Indeed, it may well have been the reason why he ceased sending any paintings to the RA at all after 1935.  Appleyard painted subject pictures, landscapes, portraits and allegorical compositions of a decorative kind associated with English Impressionism. He is known chiefly for his scenes depicting families of obviously substantial means in outdoor settings, often incorporating ruins in his compositions. He employed a particularly sensitive technique which required him to dapple the paint onto the surface, an approach that was ideally suited to capturing sporadic sunlight filtered through foliage, or across expanses of sand. Typical of his ability to capture children at play amidst shallow pools, is his painting Shaded Water in the collection of Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. He was also fond of incorporating his own children into his work.  He executed murals in the General Hospital at Nottingham, at St Mark’s Church in North Audley Street, Mayfair, London, a third (perhaps commissioned because of local connections) at the Church of SS Peter and Paul at Pickering in Yorkshire. He exhibited widely during his lifetime, at the RA (41 works), the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, (13 works), and at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts. During the years 1910-12, Appleyard worked in South Africa. His dramatic painting Lay not thine Hand upon the Lad depicts Abraham being prevented by an angel from sacrificing his son Isaac to God on Mount Moriah (Genesis, chapter 22, verse 12). It was exhibited at the RA in 1913, and although the Great War would not break out for another year, the picture may be seen as eerily foretelling the coming hostilities and the blood sacrifice of the British Empire’s youth that it would entail. During the Great War, Appleyard worked at Woolwich Arsenal in south east London, then, the largest such establishment of its kind in the world. After the war, he quit London altogether and settled in Hampshire at the village of Itchen Stoke, where he dwelt for nearly half a century as a true artist, eschewing fashion, fame and fortune. There, he focused exclusively on his painting and is reputed to have ameliorated his living expenses by letting his house to visiting anglers from the City of London and eventually selling his Turner Gold Medal to pay for an electricity connection to his home. Appleyard was also a regular exhibitor at the Royal West of England Academy and was elected a Member of that body in 1926. Appleyard died at Alresford, Hampshire on 22 February 1963. He is represented at the Tate Gallery by an oil on canvas painting entitled The Secret, a Chantry Bequest purchase from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1915. The artist wrote on 11 May 1953 that he painted the remarkable picture under the inspiration of lines from stanza five of William Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations of Immortality: ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting … But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’