Artists – S

Known as ‘the father of English Watercolour’ Sandby was an influential artist whose work bridged the gap between topography and landscape art.The son of a Nottingham textile worker and the younger brother of Thomas Sandby, he was appointed in 1747 as draughtsman to the Military Survey in the Highlands where he spent five years making pen and wash topographical drawings. By 1753 he and his brother were giving drawing lessons in London, and his teaching was to remain an important income source all his life. One of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768 he became drawing master to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in the same year.Sandby worked in oil, watercolour and bodycolour and is best known for his landscapes, real or imaginary, but he also painted historical works and country house views. An accomplished figure painter his intimate watercolour sketches of figures are popular and charming.In 1771 he travelled through North Wales with his patron Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and in 1775 he published ' XII Views in South Wales', one of the first series of aquatints made in Britain. 'The Virtuosi’s Museum' (1778-81) is a significant collection of 108 engravings made after his drawings of country houses.His work can be found in all major drawings collections in the British Isles and North America.Additional InformationRoyal AcademyTateYale Center for British ArtRoyal Collection Trust

The member of a family of topographical artists, he was the youngest of three surviving artist sons of Anton Schranz the Elder (1769-1839). The Schranz family lived in Malta from 1818. Joseph Schranz travelled to the Ionian Islands twice in 1820s painting topographical watercolours. He returned to Malta from around 1843-1844. From mid-1820s Schranz lived in Constantinople where in 1838 he became an instructor of art at the Military Academy and then at the Military High School too. He made views of the Bosphorus in pencil and watercolour which can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Crimean War (1853-6) brought Turkey to the attention of the public in Western Europe and Schranz responded to the demand for views of Constantinople by making several sets of panoramic lithographs.The end of Schranz’s life is not well documented. Additional InformationArt UKGovernment Art Collection

The son of Joseph Severn, the artist and friend of John Keats, the artist studied in Paris and Rome and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1862, at Whistler’s suggestion. He was a founder member of the Arts Club and a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours who exhibited widely throughout his career.Arthur married Joan Agnew, a cousin of John Ruskin in 1871. When Ruskin moved from Denmark Hill in South London to Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District the Severns accompanied him and remained part of the household until his death.Arthur Severn's recollections of Ruskin, edited by James Dearden, were published in 1967 under the title The Professor.

Joseph Severn was the eldest son of a music teacher from Hoxton. At the age of 14 he became apprenticed to the engraver William Bond before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1815. Here, in 1820, he was awarded the gold medal for historical painting for his ‘Una and the Red Cross Knight in the Cave of Despair’, which granted him a travelling scholarship. This coincided with the illness of his friend, the poet John Keats, and together they travelled to Rome in search of a better climate for the ailing poet. During the winter of 1820-21 Severn nursed Keats in their apartment near the Spanish Steps, his detailed letters from the period of great importance, but on 23 February 1821 Keats died. Severn remained in Rome, launching his own artistic career as a painter of landscapes, portraits and subject paintings. A companionable and likeable character, his large apartment in the Via de San Isidoro became an artistic centre for English visitors to Rome. In the winter of 1837 he met Sir Thomas and Lady Acland who were to become important patrons,and helped to promote his work in England. In 1838 their son, Henry, visited Severn in Rome. Sir Henry Wentworth Dyke Acland, later Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, became a great friend of Severn and his family. Acland gave his Oxford friend John Ruskin a letter of introduction to Severn when he visited Rome in 1840, resulting in another key relationship for the Severn family.The sketch remained in Acland’s collection in Oxford, passing along with the other contents of the house to his daughter, the pioneering photographer Sarah Angelina Acland. On the death of Sarah Acland in 1930, it was acquired by Sir Roger Mynors, then a fellow and classics tutor at Balliol.Severn remained in Rome for most of his life other than a spell in England from 1841-1861. With the help of William Gladstone, a patron, he became British Consul from 1860-72. He died in Rome in 1879 and, at his request, was buried next to Keats in the Protestant cemetery near Porta San Paolo and adjacent to the Pyramid of Cestius. Shelley, who died in 1822, lies nearby, and Severn’s posthumous portrait of him writing ‘Prometheus Unbound’ at the Baths of Caracalla of 1845 is on display at Brantwood. This portrait shows the same stretch of the Alban hills in the distance.Severn’s children, Walter, Arthur Joseph and Ann Mary Newton also became artists. Arthur Joseph was to marry Ruskin’s niece Joan Agnew and looked after him during his last years at Brantwood.The Baths of Caracalla were the second largest public baths in Rome, probably built between AD 211/212 and 216/217, during the reigns of emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla. They were excavated in the 1780s and became a very popular sketching ground for visiting artists.

Louisa Sharpe, the daughter of William Sharpe, an engraver, was the most talented of four sisters, Eliza, Charlotte and Mary Ann, all of whom became artists. Raised in Birmingham, the sisters were encouraged to travel to France and Germany to visit galleries and were taught engraving. In 1816 the family moved to London.Ellen Clayton, the Victorian chronicler of female artists, mentions the present work by name and records its date as 1841 (see E. Clayton, English Female Artists, 1876, Vol. 1 pp. 379-80.)The artist exhibited over thirty miniature portraits at the Royal Academy from 1817. Louisa developed her practise as a watercolourist and made highly finished costume subjects and domestic scenes such as the present work. Many of her drawings were engraved in popular annuals such as The Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not Annual and Heath’s Book of Beauty. Her work was engraved by Charles Heath, John Henry Robinson and Francis Engleheart. In 1829 she was elected as a member of the Old Water-Colour Society, where she was to exhibit thirty-eight works.Roget notes that her choice of subjects show a ‘taste for dramatic point, and a search for anecdote of a telling kind as well as a picturesque capacity’, extremely long titles and not a little humour (J.L. Roget, History of the Old Water-Colour Society, vol. II, reprint 1972, pp. 42-3).In 1834 Louisa Sharpe married Professor Woldemar Seyffarth and moved to Dresden. The couple had two daughters, one of whom, Agnes, also became an artist. Her work continued to be exhibited in London until her death. Her husband was the King of Saxony’s Commissioner to the Great Exhibition in 1851.Ellen Clayton describes the Sharpe sisters as ‘among the most remarkable figure painters’ and notes that the Duke of York, George III’s second son, was their first patron. She states that they were ‘among the first to originate the modern bold style of water-colour drawing’ (ibid Vol. 1 pp. 379-80).Anna Bronwell Jameson (1794-1860) the British writer, art historian and feminist who visited Dresden in 1830s wrote of Sharpe’s work in the same breath as that of Elizabeth Sirani and Angelica Kauffman and remarked that it was supremely feminine (see Sketches of Art, Literature and Character, Harper and Brothers, 1834, p. 221).Thomas Baring (1799-1873), the first owner of this watercolour was the son of Sir Thomas Baring (1772-1848) and a partner in Baring’s bank from 1828 and until his death in 1873.

The artist studied in Paris with William Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérome. He exhibited both in Paris and at the Royal Academy and Society of British Artists in London where he lived in St John’s Wood. He also exhibited his work with the London dealers Vicars Brothers.Seymour specialized in Orientalist work, taking his cue from Gérome, and may be presumed to have visited North Africa from where the majority of his Orientalist subjects are taken. He favoured working in brown washes which he worked up with bodycolour to achieve an intense and dramatic finish.

George Sidney Shepherd, the eldest son, was a member of a talented family of London topographers. Throughout his career Shepherd was patronised by the celebrated interior designer, Frederick Crace, who became equally famous as a collector of views and maps of London. Crace commissioned him to produce watercolours of London buildings and locations, and also bought others from him. The fame of the Crace Collection acted as a springboard for Shepherd’s career, as he began to receive commissions from others, including Rudolph Ackermann. From around the time of its foundation in 1809, until its demise in 1828, Shepherd produced a series of street views for Ackermann’s magazine, The Repository of Arts, sometimes in collaboration with his younger brother, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd.The Crace Collection in the British Museum contains nearly 500 images by Shepherd, including 38 views of Edinburgh for Modern Athens!. His work is also represented in many other public collections, including Kensington & Chelsea Library and the V&A.

Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, born in France on 16 January 1793, was probably the most talented member of the family of London topographers. Throughout his career, from 1809 to 1859, Shepherd was patronised by the celebrated interior designer Frederick Crace, who commissioned him to produce watercolours of London buildings and locations. The fame of the Crace Collection helped Shepherd’s career, resulting in further commissions, notably from Rudolph Ackermann for his magazine, The Repository of Arts. From around the time of the magazine’s foundation in 1809 until its demise in 1828, Shepherd produced a series of street views, sometimes in collaboration with his elder brother, George Sidney Shepherd.Although Shepherd became virtually synonymous with the modern city, he was equally at home representing the countryside and made several sketching tours, the first in 1810.Provenance: Augusta Raymond-Barker, of Fairford Park, Gloucestershire; thence by family descent until 2016

Boys moved to Paris in the early 1820s and became a friend and pupil of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828). He exhibited a large number of watercolours in Paris in the 1830s and is deemed to have made an important contribution to the revival of watercolour painting in France. Boys made several visits to Belgium in the late 1820s and 1830s and was in Brussels during the Belgian Revolution of 1830. His wife Célestine was Belgian, her home either in or near Soignies. His Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Rouen etc., was published in 1839.

The artist was born in Cumberland and patronised by 2nd Earl of Warwick who sponsored his travels to Italy in 1776 and whose name became the artist’s sobriquet. Smith spent five years in Rome and Naples, befriending William Pars and Thomas Jones, in whose Memoirs he is frequently referenced. He was one of the most admired watercolourists of his day.

A tiny view from a similar vantage point by the artist was commissioned for the library in Queen Mary’s Doll’s House and is in the Royal Collection (RL 27382).Snell trained at Heatherley’s in London, Paris and Amsterdam and exhibited work at the Paris Salon as well as in London. He was a prolific painter and exhibited his work extensively including at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Art, the Royal Scottish Academy as well as the Royal Cambrian and Hibernian Academies. He was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy London and his work can be found in several public collections.

Southall was born in Nottingham of Quaker parents, and was taken by his mother to Birmingham when his father died in 1862. In 1874 he entered the Friends’ School, Bootham, where he was taught painting by Edwin Moore (brother of Albert and Henry). Four years later he joined the Birmingham firm of architects, Martin and Chamberlain, but in 1882 he left to focus on painting and joined the Birmingham School of Art settling in Edgbaston, where he lived for the rest of his life.Southall and his wife Anna paid frequent visits to Italy and France.

Albert Sterner was born in London to American parents. He started his artistic training at the Art Institute in Birmingham and continued his studies under Gustave Boulanger, Jules Lefebvre, and Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1879, Sterner went to America, working initially as a lithographer and draughtsman in Chicago. In 1885, he founded his own workshop in New York and in 1907 was appointed chairman of the Society of Illustrators. In 1934, Sterner became a member of the National Academy of Design.Sterner’s extensive work for the press included Harper's, Quiver, Pick-me-up, English Illustrated, Black and White, Life, and Scribner's. He illustrated many literary works including L'ennui, Madame! by D. Meunier, Prue and I by G.W. Curtis and Fenwick's Career by Mrs Ward. He exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Artistes Français, winning an award in 1891 and a bronze medal in 1900 at the Universal Exhibition as well as a gold medal in Munich in 1905. Sterner’s work can be found in many US and international museums.Fitzroy Carrington (1869 – 1954) was an English-born American editor who became known as a leading authority on prints, particularly those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Born in England he moved to the United States in 1886.From 1892 to 1913 he worked closely with Frederick Keppel & Co., the New York print dealers founded in 1868, and joined the firm after 1899. From 1911-1917 he was editor of The Print Collector’s Quarterly. In 1912 he became curator of prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He published several books about prints and print collecting.The elegant subject of this drawing is his wife, Charlotte Austen Carrington, née Singleton. The couple had a son Harold, born in 1900.

In 1953 Stone and his family moved to the Old Rectory at Litton Cheney in Dorset, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. The garden and surrounding landscape proved to be a source of inspiration for his painting and engraving.

Sarah Stone was the first female British painter of birds and animals to achieve professional recognition. Her drawings of birds are a highly important visual record of the specimens held in collections in late eighteenth century England and included some from the voyages of Captain Cook, and were exhibited at the Leverian Museum in 1784. This spectacular drawing with its finished background is an important work intended for display.Stone was employed when she was still in her mid-teens to draw the objects in the Holophusican or Leverian Museum, housed in the former royal palace Leicester House, and a major cultural institution of the day. She was to work there for nearly thirty years. Its owner, Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) commissioned her by 1777 to record specimens and ethnographic material brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East.For financial reasons, Lever had to dispose of his collection in the 1780s, by lottery. Before doing so he apparently commissioned Sarah Stone to depict the birds, ethnography and antiquities. From January to March 1784 Lever exhibited Stone’s work, advertising the show as:‘a large Room of Transparent Drawings from the most curious specimens in the collection, consisting of above one thousand different articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond imagination. These will continue to be open for the inspection of the public until they are removed into the country. Admittance HALF-A-CROWN each…Good fires in all the galleries.’ (See C. Jackson, ibid, p. 22).Lever kept Stone’s drawings after the exhibition was over. The Leverian Museum continued to grow under new ownership through the 1780s and 1790s, and Stone continued working there. This exceptional drawing of a macaw can be linked with one of the three specimens of this bird sold at the sale of the Leverian Museum in 1806 when the collection was dispersed (see Christine Jackson, ibid, p. 131).Stone also drew items from other private collections and the British Museum. As most of the actual specimens have not survived, her drawings are a vital record of contemporary collections, few of which produced catalogues, and give valuable insight into the collecting practises of contemporary museums.Stone was the daughter of James Stone, a fan painter, and it is highly likely that she assisted her father. As a child she was taught to make her own pigments using natural ingredients - the intense blues and yellows of this work are extraordinary and a testament to her skill at mixing pigments. She practised working in bodycolour as well as watercolour as a child, and the exquisite brushwork which can be seen in the drawing of the feathers of the macaw also demonstrates her skill at using bodycolour and gum arabic to intensify the colours. The tree branches which Stone habitually included in her drawings are a distinctive feature of her work. Very few of her works include a sky, and Christine Jackson ibid, p. 16, suggests that she included them in watercolours which were intended to be framed. The spectacular and carefully draw nature of the present work appears to bear this out and suggests that it was an important work intended for display which remained in her family.Stone exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1781, 1785 and 1786. She exhibited paintings of birds at the Society of Artists in 1791. She married John Langdale Smith, a midshipman, on 8 September 1789 and exhibited as a ‘painter’ before her marriage and in her married name as an ‘Honorary Exhibitor’ thereafter. She painted less after her marriage, mainly drawing live birds which her husband, also an artist, brought back from his travels. She signed her work with her married name of Smith and thus the present work must date from after September 1789.Stone was nearly thirty when she married, and a daughter Eliza, who probably died in infancy, was baptised in September 1792 at St John the Evangelist, Westminster. A son, Henry Stone Smith (1795-1881) was baptized in the same church in March 1795. The family has a note by him recording a bird ‘Topial’, probably a troupial, brought back from the West Indies by his father and living and domesticated with the family (see C. Jackson, ibid, p. 30).Further examples of Stone’s watercolours can be found in the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, London, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the Yale Center for British Art, the Getty, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii and the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand.Paris Spies-Gans has written about Stone’s participation in the imperial project in Paul Mellon Centre Notes, No. 20, ‘Colonialism in the Photographic Archive’, January 2022, pp. 11-12).The blue and yellow macaw (Psittacus arauna), also known as the blue-and-gold-macaw is a large South American parrot, and one of the most popular. They live in forests and woodlands. In captivity they are known for their skill at mimicry.Patrick (Paddy) Dockar-Drysdale (1929-2020)Born in Shropshire, after his education at Oxford Paddy went to Canada with his wife Olwen, as a stage-manager of a theatre company in Newfoundland. They stayed in Canada from 1955 until 1982. Paddy switched from theatre to teaching English as an assistant professor at the University of Newfoundland and then to publishing in Toronto. His specialisms were the use of language, dialects and lexicography. He made an important contribution to the codification of Canadian English.The Dockar-Drysdales returned to England to Wick Hall, Radley where they restored the grounds and gardens.Patrick Dockar-Drysdale was a descendant of Sarah Stone and had a lifelong fascination with her work about which he was knowledgeable and which he collected throughout his life. It seems likely that the macaw may have come down in the family of the artist’s niece, Frances Smith Sheppard (1800-1849), who married Lionel John Beale, a surgeon. In 1868 their daughter Ellen Brooker Beale (d. 1900), married the businessman (who worked in the family tobacco firm) and writer William Watkiss Lloyd (1813-1893). He wrote on the classics and history, his best-known work ‘The Age of Pericles’, 1875. Sophia Beale (1837-1920), the artist, writer and sister of Ellen Beale, discussed his work in a ‘Memoir’ prefixed to Lloyd’s posthumously published ‘Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends’, 1894. Their daughter Eireene Watkiss Lloyd was Patrick Docker-Drysdale’s grandmother, who took the drawing to Wick Hall after her marriage to William Docker-Drysdale (1866-1952).

The son of William Strutt, Alfred was born in New Zealand. Like his father he drew animals throughout his career and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy.Strutt, born in Devon, was from a family of artists. He studied in Paris and made many drawings of animals throughout his career during which he travelled extensively. He visited Australia in 1850, New Zealand in 1856 and returned to England in 1862.His work is highly prized in the Antipodes and his most famous painting Black Thursday, 6 February. 1851, painted later in 1864, which depicts animals and men fleeing from a bush fire, is one of the treasures of the State Library of Victoria. His work can be found in several other Australian and New Zealand museums and several monographs have been written about his time there.He was a Fellow of the Zoological Society and he drew animals throughout his career.

The artist was the son of a wigmaker and initially trained to follow in his father's footsteps. However, he simultaneously attended drawing lessons given by Pierre Maisonnet (1783-1823), the drawing teacher at the Luxembourg Academy. When Jean-Baptiste Fresez (1800-1867) replaced Maisonnet in 1824 he recognised Sturm's talent, and recommended him to Eugène Jobard (1792-1861), the Belgian court lithographer and photographer.The Belgian Revolution of 1830 brought an end to Jobard's business; however, undeterred, Sturm began to engrave portraits himself for a living. In 1836 he painted his first works in oil, exhibiting for the first time two years later in Liège, and in 1839 he exhibited at the Brussels Triennale. Sturm moved briefly to Paris to study painting in oils but soon returned to Brussels.It was around this time that his health began to deteriorate and so, seeking a milder climate, he moved to Rome in 1842. He lived there until his death in January 1844. This painting is one of apparently few examples from this period, possibly the only one to havebeen published, and is a superb example of an artist experimenting with oils plein air at a time when such works were largely meant only for the artists' personal use and collections.The present work's subject, the Torre delle Milizie may have had special associations for this Luxembourgeois artist, as it was used by Emperor Henry VII, also known as Henry of Luxembourg, as his main bastion against the 1312 Guelph invasion.

The artist of the work was known as Lily, the oldest daughter of the Rev. John Henry Robertson Sumner and his second wife Elizabeth Anne(née Gibson). The family lived at Kelbarrow near Grasmere in the Lake District.A collection of papers relating to the Sumner family are in the possession of the Cumbria Archive Centre. It includes numerous sketchbooksby several members of the Sumner family including several of the Lake District and also of European subjects.Her sister Maggie Sumner (1859–1919) was a correspondence pupil of John Ruskin and his letters contained detailed instructions aimed at improving her drawing. She was the only female artist to contribute to the first five issues of The Yellow Book, the fashionable magazine edited by Aubrey Beardsley. Her work was very detailed and meticulous in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. One of her sketchbooks, depicting landscapes surrounded by floral borders, has an inscription gifting it to her sister Lily for Christmas 1875 and is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (Karen Taylor, British Women Artists 1780- 1890, 2020, no. 18).

Maggie Sumner was the only female artist to contribute to the first five issues of The Yellow Book, the fashionable magazine edited by Aubrey Beardsley which ran from 1894–97, taking its name from the notorious covering into which controversial French novels were placed at the time. Her pen and ink landscape sketch Plein Air appeared in number four, the last of the volumes issued under Beardsley’s editorship. Her career after this is as yet unrecorded.A collection of papers relating to the Sumner family in the possession of the Cumbria Archive Centre includes a series of eleven (unpublished) autograph letters by John Ruskin to his promising pupil, Maggie Sumner, dating from 1881–1886, which suggests that they may have met both in Oxford and at Brantwood. Towards the end of his life Ruskin had a number of correspondence pupils. His first comment in June 1881 was that her drawings were excellent with scarcely any fault. He gave her constructive criticism as in this letter of 5 July 1881 with detailed commentary on a drawing of a photograph of Rouen:I must not keep your drawings longer, though they still puzzle me, and not a little. With most students, the tendency to lose breadth in defining parts is a mere weakness: - in you, it is a kind of strength; the intensity with which you fasten on complex forms and colours having something in it like old German involved Gothic. Still, I must check the exaggerated - power, I will call it, rather than fault - and ask you to tell me if on seeing your copy of the Rouen Photo again with a fresh eye, it does not appear to you patchy, chippy - gritty, - hatchy, - botchy - (I don’t mean all these things - but something which they all partly describe) - as compared with the original? - Try a little bit again and see if you cannot get it softer and more like shade, where shade is, and more [broad] in light where light is. And - in trees, do a single branch instead of a whole tree. And do it perfectly or as perfectly as you can - keeping the shades mysterious.In May 1883 he wrote:In May 1883 he wrote: I liked your drawings much more than I told you... Work at anything you can do without too much trouble while you’re here - mossy rock if possible, and send it me.On 6 Jun 1883 Ruskin instructed Sumner what to draw: In the first place - attend to sky. - drawing all interesting cloud forms you can seize - and noting effects of morning and [evening]. In the second place, draw tree branches and foliage masses for light and shade only and anatomy of branch - letting colour alone. In the third place - draw any birds you can see - any here and paint any that are going to be cooked. Fish also, if to be had. I don’t think there’s any chance of your getting a scold from me, unless you stop working.And on 15 July 1888:Sketch the clouds in pencil - add from memory all you can, in colour the day after, if possible...The birds I meant were geese - ducks - cocks and hens... try to draw a Hen’s wing! or a duck’s breast! - I am so glad you are happier in your work - Be sure you will be more & more so. -and more useful than in any other way. The last letter dating from 24 September 1886 praises the development in Sumner’s work: your becoming fastidious in choice is the best possible sign. - But try to see how by a little change in place or introduction of minor object, even the imperfect subject may be made effective. I hope to be well enough to give you a scolding at Brantwood next time you are near me.