![]() This form of art lent itself perfectly to reproduction by the rapidly expanding popular print market and prints of Frith's work became a valuable and essential feature of his career.įrith's early paintings depicting imaginary historical subjects demonstrate his great gift for dramatic grouping and it was this particular device when used with contemporary subjects which marks Frith out as being an artist quite different from his contemporaries. The group exploited the gap which had appeared in the art market between the established academic taste perpetuated at the Royal Academy and the growing demand for narrative painting full of character and incident and executed in precise detail. Along with a number of other like-minded artists, he was the member of a group known as the Clique. In 1838, when he was 19, he had his first painting accepted at the British Institution, A Page with a Letter and this was followed in the next two years by further acceptances. Through contacts of an uncle, who had also been an hotelier, he found a clientele among a body of affluent Lincolnshire farmers and Frith made two tours of the area, charging between five and fifteen guineas a portrait. Very early in his life, Frith's qualities of independence, ambition and self-promotion showed themselves and in his second year at the academy he began to make money from portrait painting. In the same year, 1837, his father died, and his mother let the hotel and moved with her two other surviving children to a house near Regent's Park where William had space for a small studio. From an early stage, Frith's powers of observation indicated his preference for genre, a preference which remained with him and which he exploited fully.Īt 16 his father entered him into the private art academy of Henry Sass in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury and two years later he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. His parents encouraged their son's interest in art and his father was himself an amateur artist. After an unsatisfactory start in schooling in Knaresborough, the new-found relative affluence of the Friths' allowed them to send their son to board at St Margaret's, near Dover where William was allowed free reign to indulge in his enthusiasm for drawing. His parents' occupation may have been a form of apprenticeship to the hotel business, because when he was seven years of age, his father became landlord of the Dragon Hotel, Harrogate, one of England's leading spa towns. William Powell Frith was born near Ripon, Yorkshire where his parents were employed as butler and cook at nearby Studley Royal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |