Artists – W

Walmsley was born in Dublin into a military background. After a quarrel with his family, he moved to London and worked as a scene painter at the Royal Opera House. In 1788, he returned to Ireland for two years to work at the Crow Street Theatre. The inscription ‘J. Kemble’ may be a reference to the actor John Philip Kemble (1757-1832).Walmsley regularly exhibited landscapes at the R.A., including many of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Wight. Much of his work was aquatinted and published. At the end of his life he retired to Bath. Examples of his drawings may be found in the British Museum, the V&A, the Ashmolean in Oxford and many other institutions.

James Ward, RA (1769 – 1859) was considered one of the outstanding artists of his day, whose distinct style, great skill and versatility placed him above most of his contemporaries. Contemporary critics would have viewed him as an equal to Turner and Constable. Ward was born in London and was apprenticed at age twelve to the engraver John Raphael Smith, just as his brother William was completing his apprenticeship. As well as becoming known as an engraver, he was also a talented draughtsman, and he began to pursue a career as a painter. His early work was largely comprised of rustic genre scenes, characterised by loose brushwork and simplified forms. His style was heavily influenced by his brother-in-law, George Morland, and also drew on observations made during a trip to Wales. In 1794, Ward was appointed painter and engraver in mezzotint to the Prince of Wales. Around 1800, Ward adopted a more dramatic style featuring bolder forms and intense colours, as he adopted the style of Van Dyck and Rubens. At this time, he worked on several large allegorical paintings, such as the Allegory of Waterloo, now lost. As a mature artist he was much in demand for his closely observed portraits of horses, livestock and other animals. He also painted landscapes, which he sometimes modelled on Rubens. His most famous landscape is Gordale Scar (1811 – 1814), which today hangs in Tate Britain, which is considered a masterpiece of English Romantic painting. From the late 1830s, he became increasingly preoccupied with religious subjects. His career effectively ended in 1852, following a stroke. He was elected ARA in 1807 and RA in 1811. Ward’s work can be seen in many public collections, including Tate Britain, London, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.Additional InformationTateV&AYale Center for British Art

John Stanton Ward CBE, RA (1917 – 2007) is best known as a portrait painter, whose subjects included members of the Royal Family and leading public figures. He was also a landscape artist and a prolific illustrator. Born in Hereford, he studied at the Royal College of Art and served in the Royal Engineers in the Second World War, designing pillboxes along the Kent coast. He regularly exhibited at Agnew’s and the Maas Gallery. Ward gave watercolour lessons to The King. His work can be seen in the Royal Collection, The National Portrait Gallery in London and other public collections.Additional InformationNational Portrait Gallery

The son of a Swiss sculptor, born in London, the artist studied in Bern under J.L. Aberli who developed the picturesque style of topographical painting in Switzerland. After a period at the Académie Royale in Paris, Webber studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London in 1775 and exhibited there the following year, when his work impressed the botanist Dr Daniel Solander who recommended him to the third and last Cook expedition to the South Seas. Cook wrote that Mr Webber was engaged to embark with me for the express purpose of supplying the unavoidable imperfections of written accounts’. He sailed on the Resolution and Webber made drawings of landscapes and everything else of interest throughout the voyage. The expedition visited Tasmania, New Zealand, the South Pacific and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and the Icy Cape. Webber witnessed Cook’s death.On his return to Britain in 1780, a number of his illustrations were engraved.He favoured a limited palette of greys and blues, like John Robert Cozens, and his work is characterised by very fine detail.In 1787 to early 1788 he travelled to Switzerland and Northern Italy. Later in 1788 the artist made a tour of the west of England and the Wye Valley. He favoured a limited palette of greys and blues, like John Robert Cozens, and his work is characterised by very fine detail. Examples of Webber’s work may be found in the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Mitchell Library, Sydney and many other museums.

William Westall ARA (1781 – 1850) is best known as one of the first artists to depict Australia, for, while studying at the Royal Academy Schools, he was chosen as a draughtsman to Flinders’ Australian expedition, which left London in July 1801. Arriving in December, Westall having nearly drowned in Maderia en route, the expedition then circumnavigated the continent between 1802 and 1803, the first Europeans to do so. After being shipwrecked in August 1803, Westall made his own way back via Canton and India, reaching London in February 1805. As Flinders was imprisoned on Mauritius, Westall realised that it would be some time before he would be asked to work up his sketches, so he travelled to Maderia and Jamaica, returning in 1806. Between 1809 to 1812, Westall was commissioned by the Admiralty to create ten paintings based on his sketches of Australia, which today hang in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. As a result of this work, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. These paintings became the basis of the engravings in Flinders’ ‘A voyage to Terra Australis’, which was published in 1814. In 1811, Westall published ‘Foreign Scenery’, comprised of landscapes depicting the Cape of Good Hope, China, India and Maderia. This was a successful undertaking which brought him to the attention of Rudolf Ackerman, who, in turn, commissioned numerous drawings from Westall, including views for his histories of Oxford, Cambridge and the Public Schools, and over a hundred drawings for ‘Great Britain Illustrated’. Given his regular employment as an illustrator, and in contrast to his adventurous twenties, the rest of his life was spent in England, apart from a visit to Paris in 1847. His last exhibition was in 1848. His work can be seen in the Tate Gallery in London, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the National Library of Australia in Canberra.Additional InformationTateRoyal Museums GreenwichNational Library of Australia

John Mayle Whichelo (1784 – 1865) was born in Brighton. He was a pupil of John Varley and Joshua Cristall. In 1805, he given a sitting by Nelson for a chalk portrait. Active from around 1806, he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1810 and in 1812, he was described as ‘Marine and Landscape Painter to HRH The Prince Regent’. He was elected AOWS in 1823. Primarily a marine artist, depicting views of the Channel coast, he was also a London topographer. Later in his career, he turned to landscapes and river views. In England, he painted in Surrey and the New Forest, while he travelled in western Europe, visiting the Low Countries, the Rhine, Switzerland and, possibly, Sicily. His works were engraved for a number of publications, including 'Londina Illustrata' (published in two volumes in 1819 and 1825) and 'The Beauties of England and Wales' (1801-1815). His work is represented in several public collections, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection Trust.Additional InformationBritish MuseumV&A

Hugh William Williams (1773 - 1829), also known as ‘Grecian’ Williams, was a landscape artist who trained in Edinburgh. Williams was the ward of Louis Ruffini, a Turin-born manufacturer of embroidered muslin, who may have been related by marriage to Williams’ father. Having studied pattern design and other skills under David Allan in the 1790’s, he seems to have worked at Ruffini’s factory just outside Edinburgh. He may also have been a pupil of Alexander Nasmyth’s in the 1790’s, as he produced landscape watercolours in his style. He was also an actor and a scene painter.Williams established himself as a professional artist in Glasgow, and by 1793 had founded a Drawing Academy there with the miniaturist, Alexander Galloway. He returned to Edinburgh in the mid 1790s, when he involved himself in printmaking. From 1800 onwards, Williams exhibited his work in London, including at the Royal Academy in that year and in 1815. As he was not elected to the Society of Painters in Water Colours, he joined the newly formed rival group of Associated Artists in Water Colours and exhibited with it in 1808 and 1809.Back in Edinburgh in 1808, Williams became a founder member of short-lived society of Associated Artists in Watercolour. In 1813, he published six large views of Highland scenery, which he dedicated to some of his patrons, including the Dowager Duchess of Buccleuch and William Douglas of Orchardton, (d. 1821), a wealthy amateur artist and Member of Parliament.Between 1816 – 1818, Williams undertook an extended tour of Italy and Greece, funded and accompanied by William Douglas. While they were in Rome, they joined the circle of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, for whom he produced illustrations for her edition of Virgil. This tour, and subsequent exhibitions in 1822 and 1826, gave his work its distinct character his sobriquet. The exhibitions were acclaimed by critics and he worked on views based on his travels for much of the rest of his life. Despite being best known for his classical subjects, his Scottish landscapes had a formative influence on the picturesque taste and the development of landscape painting. He also travelled extensively within the British Isles, both before and after his Grand Tour in 1816-18. He lived almost entirely by his art, a remarkable achievement for a landscape painter in watercolour, but he also supported himself by publishing his work as prints. His portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn, painted in around 1818, hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. His work is represented in many public collections, including the British Museum, the V&A; Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester); Glasgow Museums and the National Galleries of Scotland; Ulster Museum (Belfast); and Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, CT).Additional InformationTateV&AYale Center for British Art

Wilson was the leading British landscapist of his age who elevated landscape painting from topography into an important genre. He started out as a portrait painter but his formative years in Italy, from 1750 - 1757 during which he met contemporary artists such as Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) caused him to change.He returned to London and set up a studio in fashionable Covent Garden. Wilson was a founder member of the Society of Artists in 1761 and the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and exhibited in both places regularly. His final years saw his work fall from favour and, badly affected by heavy drinking, he retired to Wales.

Augusta Innes Withers, the daughter of a Chaplain to the Prince Regent, was born in Cheltenham. She was well known to contemporaries and widely praised for her botanical and bird pictures, characterised by her meticulously detailed and accurate work which is beautifully exemplified in the present drawing. Withers exhibited widely, at the Royal Academy in London from 1829 to 1846, the Royal Society of British Artists where she showed sixty-eight works between 1832–65 and the New Society of Painters in Water Colours. She was one of the earliest members of the Society of Women Artists where she exhibited forty-three works from 1857–75.Withers was appointed flower painter to Queen Adelaide in 1833, flower and fruit painter to Queen Victoria in 1864 and is listed as a painter to the Horticultural Society.In 1822 she married Theodore Withers (1782–1869), an accountant from Middlesex. The couple lived mainly in London and had at least two children, Theodore (b. 1823) and Augusta (b. 1825).Withers contributed to a large number of publications including The Botanist, John Lindley’s Pomonological Magazine and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. She illustrated Robert Thompson’s The Gardener’s Assistant, 1859 and collaborated with Sarah Drake on James Bateman’s Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala.Three of Withers’ works are in the Natural History Museum, London, and a large number of her original watercolours are held in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society.Henry Rogers Broughton succeeded his older brother Urban Huttlestone Broughton as the 2nd Lord Fairhaven in 1966. He was born in the United States and educated at Harrow, before joining the Royal Horse Guards in 1920.Both brothers were great collectors and Henry put together one of the largest twentieth century collections of paintings, drawings, gouaches and miniatures. He left a large bequest of one hundred and twenty ower paintings, over nine hundred watercolours and drawings and forty- four volumes of drawings by botanical artists such as Redouté and Ehret to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in the Broughton Bequest.

Born near Zürich, Johann Jacob Wolfensberger studied there with Heinrich Fuseli between 1814 and 1817, when he travelled to Italy where he lived in Naples, for several years, and spent some time travelling in Sicily. In 1825 he was in Rome, where he befriended Horace Vernet, the director of the Académie de France. In Rome Wolfensberger was employed as a drawing teacher to the Marquess of Northampton, later President of the Royal Society. In 1829 he returned briefly to Zürich, where he lived with the painter Johann Conrad Zeller, before coming back to Rome in 1830.Between 1832 and 1835 Wolfensberger lived and worked in Athens, where he was employed by the French envoy the Baron de Rouen and the Austrian Baron Prokesch von Osten. During this time, he visited Smyrna, Constantinople and Asia Minor in 1834. He also travelled with Joseph Count of Estourmel (1783-1853) in the early 1830s in Greece and Asia Minor. The illustrated book of the Count of Estourmel’s journey was published in 1844 entitled ‘Journal d’un Voyage en Orient’.In 1838 an exhibition of two hundred of Wolfensberger’s views of Italy and Greece was held in Zürich. With the financial support of the Swiss bibliophile, scholar and collector Martin Bodmer, further exhibitions of his work took place in Vienna, Paris and London. A trip to London in 1840 resulted in a commission from the publisher Henry Fisher for a series of seventeen prints of Italian and Greek views. The artist’s marriage the following year to Hanna Dorothea Burdon, an Englishwoman, allowed him some financial security. Wolfensberger continued to make sketching trips around Europe, visiting Italy in 1843, Switzerland in 1844, and England and Scotland in 1846. Four years after he died from encephalitis in 1850, a biography of the artist was published by his widow.A large group of around five hundred drawings and watercolours by Wolfensberger can be found in the collection of the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen. Further works by the artist are in the collections of the Kunsthaus, the ETH Graphische Samlung, Zurich and the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich.

Richard Henry Wright (1857 – 1930) was born in London. He originally trained to be a chemist and subsequently studied art at Heatherley's. His work is largely comprised of atmospheric topographical subjects in watercolour and oil, and he travelled widely across Europe and Egypt. From 1885, he exhibited at leading galleries, such as the Royal Academy, Royal Hibernian Academy, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. He also had a number of solo shows with Walker's Gallery in Bond Street. He was married to the still life and genre painter Catherine M Wood. Wright’s work can be seen at the Ashmolean and the Victoria & Albert Museums. Additional InformationV&A