Carl Johann Haag was born on 20 April 1820 at Erlangen in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the son of Christoph Wilhelm Haag and Barbara Weber. From 1834 he studied with his uncle, a porcelain painter in Nuremberg. He attended school there and began producing book illustrations. He was educated at the Academies of [...]

Axel Herman Hägg was born at Katthamra, on the Swedish island of Gotland on 19 November 1835. He was educated in Visby, Gotland’s capital and studied naval architecture in the Swedish government dockyard at Karlskrona for three years. He spent much of his spare time sketching his fellow students, but gained a diploma for proficiency [...]

Cuthbert Hamilton was born in India on 15 February 1884. He studied at the Slade between 1899 and 1903, where Wyndham Lewis was a fellow student. He then taught art at Clifton College, Bristol (1907-10). Hamilton was a member of the Fitzroy Street Group and a founding member of the London Group. He was also [...]

Hermione Frances Etheldreda Hammond was born on 11 August 1910 at Hexham in Northumberland. She was the daughter of Captain Leslie Hammond, RN. Her father later remarked that if she had been born a day later she could have been christened ‘Grouse’. He met his future wife, a Canadian, Edith White, whilst serving on the [...]

Herbert Hampton was born at Hoddeston in Hertfordshire in 1862 and studied at the Lambeth, the Westminster, the Slade School of Art and in Paris at the Académie Julian. Working as a sculptor and painter, he exhibited at the RA from 1886. His bust of Field Marshal Lord Roberts was sculpted in 1900. His marble [...]

Norman Anthony Hart was born at Maidstone in Kent on 15 October 1925. His father was a local government official whose own artistic leanings had been discouraged by his parents and his mother was an amateur singer. Their mutual devotion to the arts meant that they adopted a liberal attitude to their children’s careers. ‘My [...]

John Hassall was born at Walmer in Kent on 21 May 1868. He was the son of a naval officer and was educated in Worthing, at Newton Abbot College and at Neuenheim College, Heidelberg. He twice tried, without success, to enter the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He then went to farm with his brother Owen [...]

Ashley Eldrid Havinden was born at Rochester in Kent on 13 April 1903. He studied drawing and design in evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, whilst also taking lessons from the sculptor Henry Moore. He joined the advertising agency W S Crawford, Ltd as a 19 year-old trainee in [...]

Francis Seymour Hayden was born in London on 16 September 1818. His father Charles Thomas Hayden was a doctor and music lover. Francis was educated at University College School and University College, London. He also studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, where he took his degree in 1840. He was admitted as a member of the [...]

Colin Graham Frederick Hayes was born in London on 17 November 1919. His father was Gerald Hayes, a mathematician and musicologist. His mother Winifred, a painter and sculptor, had studied at the Aberdeen and Edinburgh colleges of art, and at the Royal College of Art in London. Colin was educated at Westminster School and went on [...]

George Hayter was born at St James’s, London on 17 December 1792. He was the son of miniaturist and drawing-master, Charles Hayter (1761-1835). Initially tutored by his father, George entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1808. He studied under Henry Fuseli and was a highly regarded student and prize winner, despite the distractions of running [...]

Adrian Heath was born on 23 June 1920 at Maymyo, Burma. He attended Bryanston School in Dorset. In 1938, he became a private pupil of the naturalist painter Stanhope Forbes at Newlyn. In 1939 he entered the Slade, but his studies there were curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War. He enlisted in [...]

Eric Hebborn was born in London in 1934. His mother was a gipsy. According to him, she beat him constantly. At the age of eight, he stated in his autobiography, he set fire to his school and was sent to a borstal (reform school). Teachers encouraged his painting talent and he became connected to Maldon [...]

Dorothy Hepworth was born in 1898. She met the artist Patricia Preece at the Slade in 1917. Professor Henry Tonks had a high opinion of Hepworth’s work and Preece was praised by Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. With parental help, the two women set up a home/studio together in an apartment in Gower [...]

Josef Herman was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1911. He came from a poor family in the Jewish slum area and was the eldest of three children. His formal education ceased at the age of twelve and he became an apprentice printer-compositor, but due to lead poisoning, could not continue in that trade. He then [...]

Rowland Hilder was born on 28 June 1905 at Great Neck, Long Island, USA. His parents Roland Hilder and Kate Mildred Fissenden were of Kentish stock and in domestic service. As a child, Rowland frequently crossed the Atlantic to stay with his grandparents at Birling in Kent. The family returned to England in 1915.  At the [...]

Nicholas Hilliard is believed to have been born at Exeter in Devon in 1547. He was the son of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith. He appears to have been attached at a young age to the household of the leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, father of Thomas Bodley, who founded the Bodleian Library in Oxford. John [...]

Roger Hildesheim was born at Northwood in Middlesex on 23 March 1911. His father was Dr Oscar Hildesheim, a German-Jewish physician in general practice. His mother, Louisa Sampson was descended from Derbyshire entrepreneurs with coal-mining interests. At the turn of the century, she had studied fine art at the Slade. Anti-German feeling during the Great [...]

 
William Hoare was born at Eye in Suffolk, probably in 1707. He was the son of a prosperous farmer and was brother to Prince Hoare the Elder (1711-69), who became a sculptor of note. William was educated at Farringdon in Buckinghamshire. He demonstrated a marked aptitude for drawing and was sent to London to undertake [...]

William Hodges was born on 28 October 1744 in London. He was the only child of a blacksmith. He managed to gain some instruction whilst working as an errand boy in Shipley’s drawing school and it was there that he first came to the attention of the landscape painter Richard Wilson, who took him on [...]

Gerhard Hoffnung was born in Berlin on 22 March 1925. He was the only child of a well-to-do Jewish couple, Hilde and Ludwig Hoffnung. He was exposed to high culture at an early age, being a fan of opera and Stravinsky before his teens. The Hoffnung family departed Nazi Germany in 1938, when he was [...]

William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, London on 10 November 1697. He was the son of Richard Hogarth, a Latin teacher and textbook writer, In his youth, he was apprenticed to the silver-plate engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and the like. Young William also took [...]

Henry Holiday was born in London on 17 June 1839. In 1855, at the age of 16, he made a journey to the Lake District, the first of many such visits. Whilst there, he spent much of his time sketching the views and wrote: ‘For concentrated loveliness, I know nothing that can quite compare with the [...]

Václav Hollar was born at Prague in Bohemia on 13 July 1607. He was the son of an upper middle-class civic official. The family was ruined by the capture of Prague by Imperial forces in the Thirty Years’ War and the young Hollar, who had been destined for the law, determined to become an artist. The earliest [...]

Charles Holroyd was born at Potternewton, Leeds on 9 April 1861. His father was William Holroyd, a cloth dealer, and his mother, Lucy Woodthorpe. After attending Leeds Grammar School, he studied mine engineering at the Yorkshire College of Science In 1880 he entered the Slade, studying under Alphonse Legros, who taught him etching, which would [...]

Nathaniel Hone was born on 26 October 1831 at Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin. He was great-grand-nephew of the controversial artist Nathaniel Hone the Elder, and is therefore known to posterity as Nathaniel Hone the Younger. He studied engineering at Trinity College, Dublin and trained as a railway engineer, but at the age of 21 travelled to Paris [...]

Lucas Horenbout (sometimes anglicised to Lucas Hornbolt) is believed to have been born at Ghent in Flanders in 1490. He was the son of the painter Gerard Horenbout. Lucas was trained in the final phase of Netherlandish illuminated manuscript painting, in which his father Gerard was an important figure. His father had been court painter [...]

Percy Horton was born in Brighton in 1897. He attended the School of Art there in the period 1912-16. On of his teachers there was Walter Sickert. During the Great War, in an act of some considerable courage, Horton registered as a Conscientious Objector, in consequence of which, he was sentenced to two years hard [...]

Norman Edgar Hubert was born at Rosehill, Billingshurst, West Sussex on 1 June 1906. He was the son of William Arthur Hubert and Gertrude Louisa Williams. His father was a doctor and Hubert was the second of three boys and one girl. Much of his early life was spent in Clevedon, Somerset.  He studied art [...]

Arthur Hughes was born in London on 27 January 1831. He was the son of Edward and Amy Hughes. He entered Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School in Lambeth in 1838 and while there, displayed a talent for drawing. In 1846 he entered the School of Design at Somerset House, where he studied under the sculptor Alfred [...]

John Hungerford Pollen was born in London on 19 November 1820. Born into an aristocratic English family, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Inspired by the evangelical Oxford Movement, in 1845 he was ordained Anglican priest and allocated a parish in Leeds. There, he wrote the most touching and tragic of all [...]

William Hobman Hunt was born at Cheapside, London on 2 April 1827. His father was the manager of a city warehouse, with tastes superior to his position in life. He loved books and pictures, and encouraged his son to pursue art as an amusement, though not as a profession. At the age of twelve and a [...]

John Campbell Hutton was born on 8 August 1906 in New Zealand. He was the son of Colin Campbell Hutton and Penrhyn Florence Olive Hutton. He was educated there at Wanganui Collegiate School and studied law until the age of 25, but gave it up to pursue his all-consuming interest in art. In 1934 he [...]