Artists – B

Badmin studied at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art, which he left in 1928. He is renowned for his affectionate depictions of the English countryside and his posters and illustrations, most notably for Shell Oil. At the age of twenty-six he became one the youngest ever members of the Royal Watercolour Society and was also a member of the Royal Societyof Engravers.He exhibited at the Fine Art Society, Leicester Galleries and elsewhere. The Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum hold examples of his work. He lived in Bignor, Sussex.Additional InformationArt UKSuffold Artists

Major Francis Longe (1726-1776), the owner of Spixworth Hall near Norwich, is painted at home, just returned from shooting, presenting his wife, Tabitha (née Howes) with a bag containing a live leveret, a symbol of love. His dog peers around the door which shows the park from which his master has just returned, and a spaniel lies at his mistress’s feet. The sitters’ identity as landowners of some standing is directly expressed. The label on the back of the painting states that Major Longe is 30 years of age and this dates the work to 1756. His only son Francis, born in 1748, is standing next to his mother and would have been 8 years old at the time this work was made.Francis Longe married Tabitha Howes soon after he came down from Cambridge. Francis and Tabitha had a son, Francis, in 1748. Francis (the elder) was educated at Westminster School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge and served as High Sheriff of Norfolk in 1752, an office his son Francis was also to hold. His wife was the daughter of John Howes (d. 1771) of Morningthorpe Manor, Norfolk and his wife Barbara, daughter and heiress of Rev. Thomas Sydnor; they married in 1720. Barbara Howes was painted with her four children by D. Heins, when Tabitha was 14 years old.Francis, the boy in the present drawing, inherited the estate on the death of his father in 1776. He had married Catherine Jackson (1752-1828) four years earlier. Catherine’s father had an important position in the Admiralty, and sponsored Captain James Cook’s voyage of discovery to Australia. Sydney was originally called Port Jackson after him. Francis and Catherine Longe had no issue; Francis died in 1812 and the estate passed to his cousin upon his widow’s death in 1828.Spixworth Hall was an Elizabethan house located just north of Norwich on the Buxton Road. The estate became mired in debt in the hands of Francis’s widow Catherine; there were disputes over her ability to sell or mortgage parts of the property. She was reduced to cutting down a grand avenue of oak trees that lined the drive up to the Hall to produce an income. Spixworth Park was inherited by a relative, a great-grandson of Francis Longe and grandson of his second son called John (b.1731), Rector of Spixworth until his death in 1806. The house was demolished in 1950.The attribution to Thomas Bardwell is historic and strongly based upon stylistic grounds as well as the inscription on the (now lost) label which accompanied it into the late 20th century. Bardwell was born in East Anglia in 1704 and died in Norwich on 9th September 1767 and became very popular amongst the gentry of East Anglia where he painted portraits, views of country houses and conversation pieces. The Geffrye Museum, London have an oil group portrait, possibly of the Brewster family of Beccles, dated 1736 in their collection with similarities to the present drawing, notably in the high level of detail of the interior. Another comparable oil of the Broke and Bowles family dated 1740 is in the Government Art Collection (and was included in 'Manners and Morals, Hogarth and British Painting 1700-1760', Tate 1987-8). There are however no other known vellum works by Bardwell on the scale of the present work.Later in his career, Bardwell undertook a tour through Yorkshire to Scotland and painted portraits in some of the large houses en route. In his later years he had a thriving practice in Norwich. In 1756 he published a treatise entitled 'The Practice of Painting and Perspective Made Easy', an important book of its kind and of its time.The genre which grew in popularity from the early 1730s was initially associated with painters such as William Hogarth and Gawen Hamilton. These "conversations" represent a peculiarly English contribution to the arts. They reflected the rising prosperity of the urban middle class in the early 18th century which led to a demand for a more intimate and modest style of portraiture appropriate to the social status of a new class of patrons. They often depict their subjects in their domestic surroundings, a contrast to the swagger of grand portraiture. The paintings thus produced with a high level of skill are exceptional visual evidence of their lifestyle and rising prosperity, their pride in their economic achievements and their self-confidence within their prosperous bourgeois surroundings.Alongside these urban interiors are the relaxed rural conversation pieces of the Tory squirearchy produced in the years after about 1740 by artists such as Arthur Devis, Francis Hayman, Edward Haytley and Thomas Gainsborough. Bardwell would appear to have been well aware of these latest developments of composition and style both locally and in the metropolis. The portrait possibly of the Brewster Family of 1736 (see above) shows he was a pioneer of the genre, in both East Anglia and the country as a whole.Paul Walter was born in 1935 to Fred and Anna Walter, co-founders of the New Jersey industrial instruments firm Thermo Electric. Anna Walter was a benefactor of the Morgan Library and Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Through collecting, patronage, and leadership roles at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Paul Walter became one of the city’s most respected connoisseurs.We are grateful to M. Kirby Talley Jr. for his comments on this work.

Ann Baring, who lived in Devon all her life, was the daughter of John Baring, (1730-1816) of Mount Radford House, Devon, an English merchant banker and M.P. and the eldest son of Johann Baring (1697–1748), a clothier from Bremen in Germany who had settled in Exeter, where he built up a large business and obtained English citizenship. Her mother was Ann Parker, the daughter of Francis Parker of Blagdon near Paignton in Devon. She is known to have worked in Ireland as well as Devon. A Miss Baring commissioned a watercolour from Towne of Lago Maggiore in 1781 (Tate Gallery, Francis Towne online catalogue FT 350).After John Baring’s father's death in 1748, he inherited the large family cloth business in Exeter. Together with his younger brother Francis, he extended his commercial interests to London and set up the partnership of John and Francis Baring, of which he was the senior partner. He soon retired from activity in London for Devon and left the running of the London business to Francis, under whose guidance it evolved into Barings Bank. In 1802, Barings and Hope & Co. were called on to facilitate the largest land purchase in history, the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the area of the USA.John Baring founded banks in Plymouth and Exeter and was elected Member of Parliament for Exeter in 1776. He was also appointed Sheriff of Devon for 1776. He retired from Parliament in 1802. His daughter Ann had three sisters, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Margaret and two brothers.The Baring daughters and their cousins were prominent in Exeter society and were known in the circle that included Towne’s friends and customers. In 1786 Ann’s sister Charlotte married John Short of Bickham, one of Towne’s patrons (see FT240), and in 1790 Frances, daughter of Charles Baring, married William (see FT876), the son of Towne’s musician friend William Jackson, whose house, Cowley Place, was very near to Barton Place. In 1791 Frances’s sister Jaquetta married Sir Stafford Northcote of Pynes, another nearby estate where Towne had sketched (FT143). Charles Baring’s daughter Lucy was a close friend of Frances, daughter of John Merivale, Towne’s major patron, and after Lucy’s death in 1815 Frances married her widower, John Lewis Mallet of the Audit Office.I am grateful to Richard Stephens for his comments on this watercolour.

Barrett was a painter of landscapes and architectural subjects. He had been articled to the architect Norman Shaw and then studied in Paris under Lefèbvre and Bouguereau. He worked as an illustrator for The Graphic and The Daily Graphic. He was an inveterate traveller in the Middle East and Italy and was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint her favourite view in Florence. From 1885 he exhibited at the Royal Academy, New Watercolour Society and New Gallery, becoming AWRS in 1901 and RWS in 1913. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.Barrett’s one-man shows A Collection of Watercolour Drawings Illustrating India and Egypt was held at the Fine Art Society in 1894 and Watercolours of India at the Leicester Galleries, London in 1912.The fort at Gwalior was the favourite building of Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India.

Bawden was a painter, illustrator and graphic artist whose prints and book covers are well known. He studied and taught at the Royal College of Art, worked as a commercial artist and as a war artist in WWII. One of the main members of the Great Bardfield Artists, Essex, many of his watercolours depict the local area. His work can be found in most major collections including the Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford. Additional InformationWikipedia

Beale was born in London to Frances, née Smith, and Lionel John Beale, a surgeon. Her sister, Ellen Brooker Beale, was also an artist with whom she collaborated. Sophia and Ellen Beale went to Queen’s College School, London and took art lessons at the popular Leigh’s Academy run by the artist Matthew Leigh. They copied extensively after the Old Masters and antiquities in the National Gallery and British Museum.From 1860 to 1867 the two sisters shared a studio on Long Acre in Covent Garden. In 1869 Sophia Beale travelled in Germany and France, when the present work was drawn, and in 1872 she returned to Paris, where she took classes run for women at Charles Joshua Chaplin’s (1825-1891) studio (where Mary Cassatt also studied), financing her studies by working at M. Bertin’s studio. On her return to London, Beale used the money she had earned in Paris to open an art school in Albany Street, near Regent’s Park, teaching the latest Parisian techniques.Beale was a feminist and in 1889 among the two thousand signatories to the ‘Declaration in Favour of Women's Suffrage’ formulated by the Central Committee for Women’s Suffrage. Beale also advocated for the Royal Academy and the universities to allow greater access for women.The artist exhibited extensively during her lifetime at the Society of British Artists in Sussex Street, where she showed around thirty works, while she also had four works accepted by the Royal Academy between 1863 and 1887. Between 1868 and 1882 she exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and with the Society of Women Artists from 1860 to 1881. She published four books, A guide to the Louvre (1883), The Amateur’s Guide to Architecture (1887), The Churches of Paris from Clovis to Charles X (1893) and her autobiography, Recollections of a Spinster Aunt (1908). She also wrote articles including a review of the 1894 exhibition ‘Fair Women’ at the Grafton Gallery in London for The American Architect and Building News (1876-1908), Boston 45, no. 975 (see Meaghan Clark, Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics: Fair Women, 2021, p. 21).

Around 1819, Bentley was apprenticed as an engraver to Theodore Fielding and worked in Paris with his brother, Newton Fielding, with whom he engraved watercolours by Richard Parkes Bonington. His style was influenced by Bonington and at this time he met William Callow, a fellow apprentice.In 1827, Bentley set up as an engraver and illustrator. Focussing on watercolour, he was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1834, and a full member in 1843. He exhibited 209 works with the society, also exhibiting at the Society of British Artists and the New Society of Painters in Water Colours.Bentley travelled extensively around the coasts of the British Isles, and to the Channel Islands and Normandy, together with Callow in 1836, 1840 and 1841 gathering inspiration for his marine watercolours. His studio sale was held at Christie’s on 16 April 1855.Bentley’s work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, V&A; and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

Fanny (Frances) Blake was the sister of Frederick Rudolph Blake of Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the great-grandfather of H.M.G. Bond and E.M.G. Williams.She was an extremely talented pupil of Peter de Wint and is singled out for special mention in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ of 1851, in a review of an exhibition of the work of amateur watercolorists as an ‘accomplished artist, admirable for truth, completeness and delicacy’.This watercolour is a record of the previous church of St Patrick at Patterdale which dated from the 14th century and was extensively rebuilt around 1620, known to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Turner. A new church was built at Patterdale by Salvin in the early 1850s after a storm destroyed the building depicted here. The ancient yew tree in this work, thought to have dated back to the Norman Conquest, was destroyed in a storm in 1883.

The artist was an engraver, designer and illustrator from Paris who lived most of his life in London. He was the son of designer François Boitard (1667-1719). His distinctive line and sense of humour characterises his work which often features mildly satirical drawings of ordinary people.This drawing comes from an album of works by the artist once owned by Leonard G. Duke, the eminent collector.

Harriet Bosanquet, (1798-1830) daughter of William Bosanquet, a banker, married John Raymond-Barker of Fairford Park on 6 May 1823. They had two daughters, Augusta b. 1827 and Leonora, b. 1829, presumably the two girls in purple dresses in this watercolour. The drawing is by her sister Charlotte, the girls’ aunt. Charlotte Bosanquet was a talented artist of interiors and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford have an extensive collection of her work. When their father William Bosanquet died in 1840 Charlotte was left unexpectedly impoverished and moved from house to house staying with members of her extended Hugenot family, building up what amounted to a pictorial diary of her movements amongst the many branches of the family, usually depicting the libraries, halls, or drawing rooms of their houses. One of her sketchbooks is entitled ‘The Bosanqueti – a selection of Several Mansion Houses, Villas, Lodges, Parks, etc., the principal residences of a distinguished Family with descriptive notes’ (see Cherry, Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 131).Fairford Park was built for Andrew Barker in 1661-2 by Valentine Strong (d.1662 and completed by Strong's eldest son Thomas) and the design is known only from Kip's engraved bird's eye view of about 1710. The house was altered circa 1740 and the grounds circa 1750-60 to Rococo taste.[ ’This almost perfect Restoration composition was however much altered in the C18; the house c. 1740 and the grounds c. 1750-60 to Rococo taste ...' (D.Verey & A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 1: the Cotswolds, 3rd ed., 1999, pp.369-70].Soane remodelled the house for John Raymond Barker in 1789-90. His Journal No. 1, in the Sir John Soane’s Museum, has an entry for 22 May 1789: 'Sanders went to Fairford this Eveng / to take plans of the House / & Offices; retd the 26', other entries follow and finish with 'Received in full April 1791 £227:8:6’. Soane’s changes to this room seem to have been restricted to the chimney piece and the cornice, and the bookcases seen framing the composition of this watercolour. (A drawing for the chimneypiece of the drawing room is in the Sir John Soane's Museum).After use as an American military hospital during the war, the family sold Fairford House in 1945 and the house (not the estate) was eventually bought by Gloucestershire County Council and became the site for Farmor's Comprehensive School.

Sarah Bowdich or Sarah Lee, née Wallis (1791-1856), was the daughter of a grocer and linen-draper in Colchester, where she grew up and learnt how to fish. Her parents were prosperous, property-owning non-conformists, but her father went bankrupt in 1802 and the family moved to London, where Sarah met and married the explorer Thomas Edward Bowdich (1791-1824). He sailed in 1815 for Cape Coast Castle, in present-day Ghana, with the Royal African Company, and Sarah followed in 1816 with their new-born baby. During the voyage she caught a shark and helped put down a mutiny. While she waited for her husband to return from a trip to England, Sarah studied the local culture and natural history. Thomas led an expedition inland to the Ashanti kingdom while Sarah was the first European woman to collect plants systematically in West Africa.The family settled in Paris in 1819 to study natural science in preparation for a further expedition to Africa and were assisted by the savant, Baron Georges Cuvier. They published English translations of French works, which were illustrated by Sarah. In 1822 they sailed for Africa, spending fifteen months in Madeira to study its natural history. Soon after reaching Bathurst (now Banjul in The Gambia), Thomas Bowdich died of fever in 1824.To support her three young children Sarah Bowdich forged a career in the art of natural history and her work became very popular. In 1825 in London, she published her husband’s last work on Madeira with additions of her own. Her descriptions of new species and genera of fish, birds and plants established her as the first woman known to have discovered whole genera of plants. She remarried an assize clerk, Robert Lee in 1826.In 1826 Sarah Bowdich began her most famous work The Freshwater Fishes of Great Britain comprising forty-eight plates depicting fishes, with accompanying text. The work had fifty subscribers, headed by the Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of George III, and appeared in twelve fascicles of four plates each between 1828 and 1838. Remarkably, each illustration in each of the fifty copies is an original watercolour by the artist, not a hand-coloured print, totaling 2400 watercolour illustrations. She worked from life from just-caught specimens, beautifully illustrated by the lifelike golden sheen of the carp’s scales in the present work. Her preface comments: ‘Every Drawing has been taken from the living Fish immediately it came from the water it inhabited, so that no tint has been lost or deadened, either by changing the quality of that element, or by exposure to the atmosphere’.

Alice Boyd was one of the most talented women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In March 1859 she became a pupil of William Bell Scott who was Master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle. Her work has traditionally been overshadowed by Scott’s.Boyd and Scott fell in love, and, with his wife Letitia, divided their time between Penkill and the Scott's London home, living in a menage à trois.He first visited the ancestral home she shared with her brother Spencer Boyd in July 1860. In 1865, following Spencer’s death, Alice became laird of Penkill, the romantic castle perched on a promontory overlooking the Penwhapple burn five miles from Girvan in Ayrshire.Boyd painted several watercolours and oils outside her studio in the grounds of Penkill. She converted part of the stable block into a studio for herself and Bell Scott to use during the summer. The inscription on the original mount of the present work: Steps to the Studio, Penkill/Steps that lead to pleasant days/And work that needs nor blame nor praise, reflects a happy and productive working environment. The elaborately drawn peacock and roses and foliage, reminiscent of William Morris wallpaper, bear testament to the emerging Aesthetic movement.Boyd and Bell Scott entertained other members of the Pre-Raphaelite group at Penkill, and it was here that Dante Gabriel Rossetti found some solace in his most bleak moments of melancholia. The Penwhapple Burn inspired his poem The Stream's Secret, begun when he was staying at Penkill in 1869.His sister Christina delighted in the views of Ailsa Craig and the Clyde from the window in her turret bedroom and Alma-Tadema showered every morning in the freezing torrents of the Penwhapple waterfall. William Holman Hunt sent souvenirs to Penkill as gifts for Alice, Arthur Hughes was a frequent visitor and William Morris is believed to have designed four embroidered panels which hung in the passage from the banqueting hall. Penkill has been described as having a 'relaxed atmosphere of art and animals, whisky, friends and endless talk' (Country Life, 21 March 1991, p. 118).Penkill was a centre of the Pre-Raphaelites until 1885 when Bell Scott had an angina attack and was almost bedridden until his death five years later. Alice lived there for another seven years.Christie’s sold many of the contents on 15 December 1991 and the castle is now a private residence.

The second son of Hercules Sharpe, the artist was educated at Harrow. After leaving Cambridge where he read Maths he decided to become an artist and studied in Rome for three years. On the death of his elder brother he inherited the Brabazon estates (and name) in Ireland. He spent his summers in England and his winters travelling in Europe and, from the 1860s, further afield. The artist visited India three times, in 1870, 1875 and 1876.In 1891 Sargent persuaded him to have an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery and, as a result, in his old age he was at the forefront of the modern movement.

America’s best known Orientalist painter, Bridgeman went to Paris in 1866 and became a pupil of Jean-Leon Gérôme. He visited Egypt in 1873-1874, a trip which provided him with important inspiration and critical success for the pictures of the East which it inspired. His Paris Salon exhibit in 1877 The Funeral Procession of a Mummy on the Nile, bought by James Gordon Bennett, brought him the Cross of the Legion d’Honneur. He regularly exhibited during his lifetime at the Paris Salon, the Royal Academy, London and in the USA.

The artist was an architect, the eldest son of the architect John Buckler, who drew Lyte’s Carey and the nearby church in 1834. A pair of unsigned sepia sketches of the same views, probably studies for the present works, hang at the house. These crisp works are typical of his meticulous draftsmanship and attention to architectural detail.Buckler specialised in the restoration of country houses, rebuilding Costessey Hall, Norfolk in 1825-6, a project acclaimed as an important instance of Gothic Revival in domestic architecture by Charles Locke Eastlake. In 1836 he came second in the competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire. He also completed a number of restoration projects in parish churches including St Mary’s, Adderbury, Oxfordshire, St Nicholas’, Old Shoreham, West Sussex, St Mary’s, Steeple Barton, Oxfordshire and others.Buckler worked at a number of Oxford colleges, notably Brasenose, Oriel, Magdelen and Jesus and at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. He also restored Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, Hengrave Hall, Suffolk, and designed Butleigh Court in Somerset in 1845 and Dunston Hall, Norfolk from 1859.

John Butler Yeats’ career as an artist began in the 1860s when he left a promising career in law. In 1867, he left Dublin for London, taking his two young children, Willie (William Butler Yeats) and Lily (Susan Mary Yeats) with him, and enrolled at Heatherley School of Art. His early career is marked by a pre-Raphaelite influence and he much admired the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the early 1870s he studied at the Slade School of Art under Edward Poynter and found his strength in portraiture. He admired the work of George Frederick Watts, notably his Hall of Fame series depicting celebrated Victorians of the period which influenced commission from Hugh Lane in 1903 to paint Ireland’s most prominent cultural figures, now largely housed in the National Gallery of Ireland. Yeats wrote that ‘The best portraits will be painted where the relation of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship’. His pencil sketches of his family and friends have a great sensitivity and familiarity to them and it is with the pencil that he was at his best. Yeats returned to Dublin from London. By his early sixties, he had finally risen to prominence, chiefly through the success of his shared exhibition with Nathaniel Hone organised by Sarah Purser in 1901 and through the Hugh Lane commission. He was a pivotal figure in the artistic and intellectual life of the city. By this time, his children were establishing themselves within Dublin cultural life , Willie through his poetry and the Abbey Theatre, Lily and Lolly through Dun Emer and later Cuala Press and Jack through his illustrations and paintings. In 1907, when the opportunity to travel to New York emerged Yeats moved across the Atlantic where he spent the last fourteen years of his life.Additional InformationNational Gallery IrelandBritannica