Posts in Category: English
John Crome
John Crome, December 22, 1768–April 22, 1821, was an English landscape painter and etcher born in Norwich. Apprenticed to the coach and sign painter Francis Whisler, he later worked as a drawing master and studied the work of Dutch landscape painters.
Crome and Robert Ladbrooke founded the Norwich Society of Artists in 1803. He served repeatedly as its president, taught artists including James Stark and Edward Thomas Daniell, and painted landscapes centered on Norwich and the Norfolk countryside.
Crome remained in Norwich until his death in 1821. His work is held by Tate, the Yale Center for British Art, the National Galleries of Scotland, Norfolk Museums Collections and other British and American collections, and he is regarded as a principal founder of the Norwich School of painters.
John White
John White, active 1577–1593, was an English artist, mapmaker, explorer, and colonial governor. His early life and artistic training are uncertain, although he may have belonged to London’s Painter-Stainers’ Company.
White may have accompanied Martin Frobisher’s 1577 Arctic voyage and served as artist and mapmaker on the 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island. Working with Thomas Harriot, he made watercolours recording Indigenous people, settlements, ceremonies, foodways, plants, and animals. Theodor de Bry later adapted many of these images as engravings.
White became governor of the Roanoke Colony in 1587. Delayed in England while seeking supplies, he returned in 1590 to find the settlement abandoned. He was last documented in 1593; the principal collection of his surviving watercolours is in the British Museum, London.
William Daniell
William Daniell was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1769 and trained under his uncle, Thomas Daniell. As a teenager he accompanied Thomas to India, where the pair traveled widely and recorded architecture, landscapes, and everyday life in drawings and paintings.
After returning to Britain in 1794, the Daniells transformed their Indian studies into Oriental Scenery, issued in six parts from 1795 to 1808. William became a highly accomplished aquatinter as well as a landscape and marine painter, combining topographical precision with dramatic atmosphere.
Daniell later traveled around the British coast for A Voyage Round Great Britain, published in eight volumes from 1814 to 1825 with 308 aquatints. Elected a Royal Academician in 1822, he continued exhibiting marine, Indian, and panoramic subjects until his death in London on August 16, 1837.
William Hodges
William Hodges, October 28, 1744 – March 6, 1797, was an English landscape painter and printmaker born in London. He trained at William Shipley’s drawing school and became a pupil and assistant of the landscape painter Richard Wilson.
Hodges accompanied Captain James Cook’s second Pacific voyage aboard Resolution from 1772 to 1775 as expedition artist. He later worked in India under the patronage of Warren Hastings, published Select Views in India, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1787.
After further travel in Europe, Hodges continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy until 1794 and retired from painting in 1795. He died at Brixham, Devon, in 1797; important holdings of his work are in the National Maritime Museum, British Museum, and Yale Center for British Art.
Tilly Kettle
Tilly Kettle, January 31, 1735 – July 1786, was an English portrait painter who worked in Britain and India. He trained at William Shipley’s drawing academy, St Martin’s Lane Academy, and the Duke of Richmond’s academy in London.
Kettle established himself as a portraitist in Oxford and the English Midlands before travelling to India in 1768. He worked in Madras, Calcutta, and at the court of Shuja al-Daula in Awadh, painting British East India Company officials and Indian rulers.
His works are held by the Yale Center for British Art, Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, National Army Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and other public collections.
