William Havell was born at Reading in Berkshire on 9 February 1782. He was the son of the drawing master at Reading Grammar School. The Havell family included a number of notable engravers, etchers and painters, as well as writers, publishers, educators and musicians. In particular, members of this family were foremost practitioners of aquatint and had a long acquaintance with Indian art and culture. The Havells are descendants of the Hauteville family of Normandy. William travelled North Wales in 1802-03 and settled in London in 1804. The following year, he was a founding member of the Old Water Colour Society. He produced numerous watercolours and oils of Thames Valley subjects from 1805 onwards, often working in the open air. At that time, he was a great admirer of J M W Turner, who carried out his own campaign of oil sketching on the Thames in that very same year. Probably influenced by the success that John Glover enjoyed in selling nine of his Lake District pictures at the Watercolour Society in 1806, Havell spent much of 1807 in Cumberland. He exhibited watercolours of Windsor Castle at the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1806, 1807 and 1808. He contributed illustrations to several periodicals and a series of his paintings was published in aquatint as Picturesque Views of the River Thames (1812). At the same time, he began to establish something of a reputation as an oil painter in the manner of Richard Wilson and Turner, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the British Institution. However, his Walnut Pickers at Petersham was rejected by the British Institution in 1815 and in a state of some disillusionment, the following year he accepted the post of official artist to William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst (1773-1857), ambassador extraordinary to the court of the Chinese Emperor. The purpose of the embassy was to address ‘the complaints of injustice and exactions on the part of the Chinese mandarins from the English merchants at Canton’. The voyage proceeded via Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, the Cape and Java. Havell busied himself with producing landscapes of the views he encountered during his travels. It is not certain whether he accompanied Amherst to Pei Ho, or whether he remained with the ships at the Grand Canal of the River Hai, near Tongzhou. On arriving at Pei Ho, Lord Amherst was informed that he could only be admitted to the presence of the Jiaqing Emperor, on condition of performing the kowtow, a ceremony which Western nations considered degrading. Amherst refused to consent to that condition and was consequently refused permission to enter Peking. It is unclear at which point Havell left the embassy and whether he was on board HMS ALCESTE when she was shipwrecked on a sunken rock in the Caspar Strait on the return journey. However, whilst in China, he completed several versions of his views of the Grand Canal. In 1827 he exhibited A View on the Grand Canal near Chong-trieu. That same year, he displayed Sunrise; Entrance to the Grand Canal at the Royal Watercolour Society and the following year, exhibited View of the Grand Canal, near Changtsieu, China at the Royal Society of British Artists. Havell’s Waterfall at Aberdeen, Hong Kong may be found in the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It depicts the mission’s ships anchored in Hong Kong waters on their journey to Beijing, in order to stock up on supplies of fresh water. Havell abandoned his Chinese adventure during a stopover in Macao and spent the next eight years in India, painting portraits and landscapes in watercolour. There, he tutored and associated with the artists George Chinnery and James Baillie Fraser. He sent Fraser’s completed paintings home to the engravers Robert Havell senior and junior, his uncle and cousin. He departed Calcutta in February 1819. After suffering a bout of cholera, Havell returned to England in 1826 and rejoined the Old Water-Colour Society in 1827, but after 1830, painted exclusively in oils. In 1828-29 he travelled in Italy with the painter Thomas Unwins. Subsequently, he remained in England, exhibiting vivid landscapes that did not bring him the renown that he had once seemed likely to achieve. Havell died in Kensington, London on 16 December 1857. His Yachts of the Cumberland Society Racing on the Thames (1815) may be found in the collection of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and the Reading Museum and Art Gallery has his oil sketch The Braganza Shore, Rio de Janeiro.