James Smetham was born on 9 September 1821 at Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire. He was the son of a Wesleyan minister and remained a devout follower of the sect throughout his life. He was educated at a school for the sons of Methodist ministers in Leeds and was then apprenticed to the Gothic Revival architect Edward James Willson (1787-1854) in Lincoln. Willson allowed Smetham to spend much of his time drawing the paintings and sculptures in Lincoln Cathedral and after three years, released him from his articles to become a painter. He set himself up as a portrait painter in Shropshire, before travelling to London and entering the RA in 1843. The advent of commercial photography had a profound impact on his livelihood, as it did on that of other portraitists of the time. In 1851 he obtained the position of drawing master at the Wesleyan Normal College in Westminster. In 1854 he married his fellow teacher Sarah Goble. Their union would eventually produce six children.  Smetham produced religious and literary themes as well as portraiture; but he is perhaps best-known as a landscape painter. Out of a lifetime output of some 430 paintings and 50 etchings, woodcuts, and book illustrations, his 1856 painting The Dream is perhaps his best-known work. Smetham was a close friend of both Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, both of whom held his work in high esteem. However, he never attained a reputation beyond his small circle during his lifetime. Smetham’s art was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite style in the 1850s. Smetham was also an essayist, art critic and poet. His articles for the Quarterly Review included ‘Religious Art in England’ (1861), ‘The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (1866), and ‘Alexander Smith’ (1868). From early on in his career, Smetham was an admirer of William Blake and his deep sympathy for that artist revealed itself in a long and perceptive review of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake he penned for the Review in 1868. Smetham underwent a mental breakdown in 1857 and the second half of his life was marked by a growing religious mania and descent into insanity. In one of his notebooks he attempted to illustrate every verse in the Bible. He habitually created miniature, postage-stamp-sized pen-and-ink drawings, in a process he called ‘squaring’. He produced thousands in his lifetime. Smetham also produced book illustrations, such as those for E B Tylor’s Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans (London, 1861), and a collection of his etchings appeared as Studies from a Sketch Book (1861). After 1869 Smetham no longer exhibited at the RA. Increasingly torn between painting and literature, the last twelve years of his life were overshadowed by his madness, compounded by religious melancholia and a sense of failure and disappointment. The rejection by the RA of Smetham’s painting The Rose of Dawn in 1877 was the final straw and he experienced a mental and physical collapse from which he never recovered. His friend Rossetti, who had given him moral support for years, went to great lengths to find buyers for his pictures in order to help his family. A selling exhibition of Smetham’s work was held in Rossetti’s studio in 1878, and The Rose of Dawn may well have been included. It was one of twelve pictures sold to the Leeds art dealer Edmund Bates in 1879, again on Rossetti’s initiative. Smetham’s surviving journals and notebooks show that he practiced an almost stream of consciousness type of writing that he called ‘ventilating’, as a method of religious self-analysis. These writings delineate the depression that came to dominate Smetham’s outlook. In the 1870s Smetham began to paint in thinned oils mixed with copal (a kind of resin) over pen and ink on small panels, that he could ‘do in a day and at a sitting’, ‘glowing in colour and rich in effect’, ‘too small for Exhibitions – more for cabinets’. They were to have been his financial salvation, but nothing could save him from the depression that gave him insomnia, against which he dosed himself increasingly with chloral. Towards the end of his life he wrote: ‘Am I to be gradually crushed and ruined by critics, utter neglect or collision with Methodism?’ Smetham died in London on 5 February 1889 and was interred in Highgate Cemetery. His chalk and wash self-portrait may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. His works Naboth in his Vineyard (1856) and The Eve of St Agnes (1858) may both be found in the collection of the Tate in London.