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Richmond [self~portrait >] was born in London, the son
of a painter and Academician. His father was a great admirer of William
Blake, the visionary, painter, and poet, hence naming his son in his honor.
Richmond entered the RA Schools in 1858, where he was a contemporary and
friend of Albert Moore. He was an accomplished portraitist, and throughout his life he had a considerable output of portraits of ’the great and the good.’ Like many other serious minded Victorian artists, he was not comfortable with being ‘merely’ a portrait painter. He traveled to Italy, therefore, to study great works of the Old Masters. Richmond painted large scale classical pictures following this visit. These works show the influence of Lord Leighton, in their high degree of finish, and father static nature. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1895. He lived well into the 20th century, when his art was deeply unfashionable.
— Richmond entered the Royal Academy schools in 1857 and exhibited there from 1861. As a painter he was active in three main fields: history painting (e.g. The Procession of Bacchus at the Time of the Vintage, 1869), portraiture, an area in which he was prolific, and landscape (e.g. Near Viareggio, 1876). His best-known portrait is The Sisters (1864), the daughters of Dean Liddell of Christ Church, Oxford. Richmond also designed and sculpted the monument to William Gladstone (1898) in Hawarden church, Clwyd.
— Richmond was born in London, the son of the painter George Richmond RA, a devotee of William Blake, who named his son after the artist. Richmond received a classical education, learning Latin and Greek, and also came under the instruction of John Ruskin, a friend of George Richmond. He entered the RA Schools in 1858 and was a keen student of drawing from the Antique. He was, however, dissatisfied with the teaching and left shortly afterwards. In 1859 he made his first visit to Italy, where he copied Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Padua, and was influenced by the rich colors of Titian in Venice.
Richmond's first RA exhibit in 1861 was a portrait group of his brothers, and portraiture continued to be a major part of his work throughout his life. His sitters included Darwin, Holman Hunt, Gladstone and Browning. Richmond was determined, however, to paint not only portraits, and therefore decided to return to Italy for a few years and also visited Algiers in 1870. Richmond began to paint high art subjects on a monumental scale and was also commissioned to paint frescoes and design mosaics for the ceiling of Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1891-4. Visits to Greece in 1882 and 1883 resulted in several epic classical works such as Venus and Anchises (1890) which combined classical forms and swirling drapery with minute attention to the details of plants and flowers. He was elected ARA 1888 and RA 1895.
— Sir William Blake Richmond, KCB RA, died on Friday 11 February 1921 at his home, Beavor Lodge, Hammersmith, aged 78. If heredity counts for anything in art, Sir William Richmond had every claim to be an artist, for not only was he the son of the distinguished portrait painter George Richmond RA [28 Mar 1809 – 19 Mar 1896], he was the grandson of Thomas Richmond, a prolific and successful miniature painter, whilst his grandmother was the daughter of George Engleheart [1750-1829], the contemporary and rival of Conway.
Partly for reasons of health, he was educated privately; which as his parents were highly cultivated people and their house a center of artistic society, rather of the imaginative and even mystical type, meant that the boy was bred upon art and music. The household friends were men like Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, while over them all brooded the memory of William Blake, to walk with whom George Richmond used to say ‘was like walking with the Prophet Isaiah.
After the friend of his father William Blake Richmond was named. In early boyhood he had a passion for music, but before he was 14 he had turned to drawing and entered the RA Schools. At this date he was much influenced by the group of Pre-Raphaelites, men several years older than himself and already coming to the front — Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones — and perhaps still more by their great literary advocate John Ruskin.
Partly stimulated by them, and partly by a first visit to Italy, he painted several pictures, chiefly illustrating poetical or classical legend, or Bible stories a class of work he preferred above all others, even when he had become, in the sixties and seventies, a favorite portrait painter.
The pictures at which he worked hardest, and into which he put most of himself shown to the end of the century were such as The Death of Ulysses, The Song of Miriam, and best of all An Audience at Athens during the performance of Agamenmon.
Several of the portraits are greatly admired, especially the Lady Hood, and the Andrew Long, and the beautiful Three Daughters of Dean Liddell, a work of about 1870. The picture of Long in particular is admirable, not only for its design and execution, but for its grasp of character.
Richmond had many sitters amongst eminent men; Gladstone sat to him twice; he painted Darwin and Browning; and, in 1887, he went to Berlin and painted Prince Bismarck.
At a later stage he was given the formidable commission to decorate Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and to this work for many years he gave his utmost energies. There were many who thought it a mistake to attempt such a colossal undertaking, seeing that it is quite uncertain that Wren ever contemplated anything of the kind for his great church, and seeing that mosaic decoration has never taken root in England, but Richmond was courageous enough to make the effort, filled as he was with Italian memories and Italian ideas. The work so far as it has gone, has been as much attacked as praised.
Richmond’s solid reputation will rest rather on his portraits, often beautiful and always full of the truth of character, and upon some at least of his large ‘historical,’ or rather ideal pictures, of which The Audience at Athens has the most enduring merit.
Sir William Richmond, who had known and loved Assisi well since 1868, when he spent a summer in that city, published in 1919 Assisi Impressions of Half A Century. In this book recollections of blissful days with his paint-box among the kindly friars and genial farm folk, mingle with his discourse on the upper and lower churches, and the hills and valleys of the neighborhood. A number of his own sketches reproduced in color, illustrate many of his reminiscences.
— LINKS
–- Henry Dawson Greene [1862-1912] of Slyne and Whittington Hall [Child, Dog, Flowers] (76x122cm)
— Mrs. Ernest Moon (1888, 127x102cm; 512x404pix, 30kb) _ Richmond is best remembered for his academic pictures, but like his father before him he was a highly gifted portraitist. Here he shows the contrasting colors and textures of opulent fabrics against the simple white of the woman’s dress. This, combined with the languid posture and expression of the sitter, creates a uniquely ‘aesthetic’ image. Contemporary critics also noted its affinities with the Italian Renaissance painter Bronzino. The sitter was Emma Moon, a young Australian who married an English barrister. This portrait celebrated their marriage, and she is shown wearing the richly decorated coat which she embroidered herself.
— The Slave (1886, 91x53cm) _ Richmond's source for The Slave, and its meaning, remain obscure. Possibly it is connected to Orientalist depictions of captive women, a theme perhaps inspired by his visit to the Middle East in 1885.Sir William Blake Richmond was a painter of allegorical, mythological and religous subjects, as well as landscapes and portraits. He also made sculpture, and decorated the interior of Saint Paul's Cathedral. He was initially influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and knew Holman Hunt and Millais through his father, George Richmond. Richmond believed passionately in the necessity for serious subject matter in art, and the primacy of academic painting.
— The Libyan Desert Sunset (1888, 29x40cm) _ pinkish brown almost-monochrome.
