BIOGRAPHIES OF BRITISH ARTISTS

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BIOGRAPHIES OF BRITISH ARTISTS

Edited by Mark Quinlan

ABBEY, EDWIN AUSTIN

Edwin Austin Abbey was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 1 April 1852. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Christian Schuessele. He began work as an illustrator, producing numerous illustrations and sketches for such magazines as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine. He was on the staff of Harper’s by the [...]

ABBOTT, LEMUEL FRANCIS

Lemuel Abbott is believed to have been born in Leicestershire in 1760. He was the son of the Reverend Lemuel Abbott and his wife Mary. In 1775 at the age of 14, Abbott was apprenticed to the painter Francis Hayman, after whose death the following year, he returned to his parents and probably continued to [...]

ADAMS, GEORGE GAMMON

George Gammon (sometimes spelled Gamon) Adams was born in 1821. Little is known about his background and early years, but it is known that he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1840 on the recommendation of the medallist William Wyon (1795-1851). That same year, he won a silver medal at the Academy and in 1841, [...]

ADAMS, NORMAN

Norman Edward Albert Adams was born on 9 February 1927 to working-class parents at Walthamstow, London. His father was a clerk with London Transport. Norman studied at Harrow School of Art from 1940 to 1946 and won a scholarship to the RCA, before being called up for military service. In 1947 he married Anna Butt [...]

ADAMSON, GEORGE

George Worsley Adamson was born on 7 February 1913. He was the son of George William Adamson, a Glaswegian engineer working in New York and Mary Howard. Following the deaths of both his parents in the early 1920s, George and his two sisters were brought up by aunts in Wigan, Lancashire, his mother’s hometown. He [...]

ADLER, JANKEL

Jakub Adler was born of Jewish parentage in the suburb of Tuszyn, Łódź, Poland on 26 July 1895. He was the eighth of ten children born to Eliasz Adler, a timber and coal dealer, and his wife, Hana Laja, née Fiter. At one point in his youth, Adler considered becoming a rabbi, but in 1912 [...]

ADSHEAD, MARY

Mary Adshead was born in London on 15 February 1904. She was daughter of Stanley Adshead, the artist, architect and professor of civic design. Her mother Annie took charge of her education and, herself a keen gardener, instilled in Mary an artist’s interest in exotic plants and their foliage. Mary attended the Slade School of [...]

AGAR, EILEEN

Eileen Agar was born on 1 December 1899 at Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her father James Agar, was a Scottish businessman and her mother an American. The family moved to London in 1911. Eileen was educated at Canford Cliffs, Dorset, Heathfield St Mary’s School, Ascot (where she was taught art by Lucy Kemp-Welsh); Tudor Hall, Chislehurst [...]

AITCHISON, CRAIGIE

John Ronald Craigie Aitchison was born in Edinburgh on 13 January 1926. He was the son of barrister Craigie Mason Aitchison, KC, later the first socialist Lord Advocate for Scotland. Craigie did not enjoy the relentlessly hearty environment of Loretto School, and when his father died, he used it as an excuse to quit that [...]

ALDIN, CECIL

Cecil Charles Windsor Aldin was born in Slough, Berkshire on 28 April 1870. He was a boarder at Eastbourne College, then attended Solihull Grammar School. Aldin’s father was a keen amateur artist, so Cecil commenced drawing at a young age. He studied art in the studio of the painter Albert Moore and at the National [...]

ALLAN, SIR WILLIAM

William Allan was born in Edinburgh in 1782. He was the son of William Allan, who held the office of macer in the Court of Session. Young William was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, where he could make neither head nor tail of Latin or Greek and spent much of his time sketching his [...]

ALLINGHAM, HELEN

Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born at Swadlincote in Derbyshire on 26 September 1848. She was the eldest of seven children born to the physician Dr Alexander Henry Paterson and Mary Chance Herford, daughter of a Manchester wine merchant. Within the first year of her life, the Patersons moved to Altrincham, Cheshire, where Helen’s father [...]

ALMA-TADEMA, SIR LAWRENCE

Lourens Tadema was born on 8 January 1836 in the village of Dronrijp in Friesland in the Netherlands. His father was a notary public. It was intended that the boy would become a lawyer; but in 1851 at the age of 15, he was diagnosed as consumptive; given only a short time to live and [...]

ANDERSON, SOPHIE GENGEMBRE

Sophie Gengembre was born in 1823 at Paris in France. She was the daughter of Parisian architect Charles Antoine Colomb Gengembre and his English wife. Sophie was largely self-taught, but is known to have briefly studied portraiture under Baron Charles von Steuben in Paris in 1843. The family left France for the USA, to escape [...]

ANDREWS, SYBIL

Sybil Andrews was born on 19 April 1899 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. ‘We had a paint-box from the cradle’, she would later recall, ‘not with the idea of being wonderful artists, but as a way of keeping us quiet and amused.’ She remembered her first proper paint-box with china containers for the watercolour [...]

ANGUS, PEGGY

Margaret MacGregor Angus was born in Chile in 1904. She was the eleventh of the 13 children of a Scottish railway engineer. In 1922 she went to the Royal College of Art, beginning in the painting school, but switching to the Design School, where her contemporaries and friends included Helen Binyon, Edward Bawden and Eric [...]

ANSDELL, RICHARD

Richard Ansdell was born on 11 May 1815 at Liverpool in Lancashire. He was the son of Thomas Griffiths Ansdell, a ship’s pulley block maker at Liverpool Docks and Anne Jackson, a seamstress. His father died when he was young and he was educated at the Bluecoat School. He was subsequently trained by the portrait painter [...]

APPLEYARD, FREDERICK

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 [...]

ARDIZZONE, EDWARD

Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone was born at Haiphong, Tonkin in French Indo-China on 16 October 1900. His father Auguste Ardizzone was on overseas government service. His father, although born at Bône in Algeria, was of Italian parentage. Ardizzone arrived in England with his two sisters Elizabeth and Lauretta in 1905 and was educated at Ipswich [...]

ARMITAGE, EDWARD

Edward Armitage was born in London on 20 May 1817. He was the eldest of the seven sons of James Armitage and Anne Elizabeth Armitage née Rhodes, of Farnley Hall, Leeds, Yorkshire. The Armitage family were wealthy Yorkshire industrialists. Armitage’s art training was undertaken in Paris, where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in [...]

ARMITAGE, KENNETH

William Kenneth Armitage was born on 18 July 1916 at Leeds. Foxy Walker, one of Armitage’s schoolteachers persuaded his mother to let him take up the arts, for which Armitage remained ever thankful. He studied at Leeds College of Art (1934-37) and won a scholarship to study at the Slade (1937-39). During the Second World [...]

ARMOUR, GEORGE DENHOLM

George Denholm Armour was born in Waterside, Lanarkshire on 30 January 1864. He was the son of a cotton broker. His earliest years were spent in Liverpool. He was educated at Glasgow Academy and Madras College, St Andrews. After attending St Andrews University, he moved to Edinburgh, where he studied at the Edinburgh School of [...]

ARMSTEAD, HENRY HUGH

Henry Hugh Armstead was born in London on 18 June 1828. At the age of eleven, he entered the workshop of his father, a heraldic chaser. At the age of 13, at the instigation of Holman Hunt, he entered the School of Design at Somerset House, under Leigh. He next worked at Hunt & Roskell’s [...]

AUSTIN, ROBERT

Robert Sargent Austin was born at Leicester on 23 June 1885. He was the son of cabinet maker Robert Austin. He attended the Leicester Municipal School of Art (1909-13), from which he won a scholarship to the RCA in 1914. It was there that he undertook the study of life drawing, which would become a [...]

AYRTON, MICHAEL

Michael Ayrton Gould was born on 20 February 1921 at St Pancras, London. His parents were the poet and literary critic Gerald Gould and the socialist politician Barbara Ayrton. Michael’s childhood education was much disrupted through illness, but he was inspired by works seen on his European travels to take up drawing and painting. His [...]

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