THE PAINTINGS GALLERIES
Artist Biographies A-B
Biographies of artists and collectors included in the V&A's collections
Thomas Allom (1804-1872)
Allom was a watercolourist and illustrator, an architect and topographical draughtsman. He practised as an architect mainly in London, notably on the Kensington Park Estate in the 1850s and was a founder member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Allom was most prolific and successful as a topographical artist during the 1830s and 1840s. His drawings were engraved in travel books on England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Austria, the Near East and China. He travelled extensively for this purpose, including a trip to Turkey and Palestine in 1838.
John Armstrong (1893-1973)
Armstrong’s early career was as a theatrical designer and easel painter. Later he also worked as a commercial designer for Shell and ICI. His paintings, involvement with artists such as Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson, and his experimental work for films and ballet ensured him a respected place in avant garde circles. Much of his work was based on Greek mythology.
Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900)
Ashbee was born in London, the son of a gunpowder manufacturer. He was educated in London and became a senior partner in a firm of silk merchants. Ashbee travelled around the world in 1881, and wrote numerous articles, mainly on bibliographic subjects. His son was the famous arts and crafts designer CR Ashbee. He left his library, of over 15,000 volumes, to the British Museum, and his collection of paintings, watercolours and illustrations to the V&A.
Michael Ayrton (1921-1975)
Ayrton was born in London and had an extremely varied career, working as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, illustrator, broadcaster and author of novels and art criticism. He was also well travelled, lived in France as a young man, and later spent lengthy periods in Italy and Greece. He was preoccupied by Greek mythology and used it as a source in much of his creative work.
Delmar Banner (1896-1983)
Banner lived in the Lake District where he painted local landscapes and portraits. He was also an Anglican lay priest and was married to the sculptor Josefina de Vasconcellos. Banner’s well-known painting of the author Beatrix Potter is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
George Barret (1767/8-1842)
Barret was the son of an Irish painter who settled in London in 1762. He was a leading member of the Old Watercolour Society, where he exhibited over 600 works. Barret specialised in poetic treatments of the effects of sunrise, sunset and moonlight in classical settings. His Theory and Practice of Water Colour Painting was published in 1840.
James Barry (1741-1806)
Barry was born in Cork, Ireland. He taught himself to paint by copying prints and in 1763 went to Dublin. The patronage of Edmund Burke encouraged him to move to London and to visit Paris and Rome between 1765 and 1771. He developed grand ideas about the role of art in society and returned to London in 1771, where he began a volatile relationship with the Royal Academy (Academician in 1773, Professor of Painting from 1782) which ended with his expulsion in 1799. Barry was one of the most distinguished history painter of the time, but he was commercially unsuccessful, and supported himself by painting portraits, which are always remarkable.
Edward Bawden (1903-1989)
Bawden was born in Essex and studied at the School of Art in Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, where he befriended Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash. As well as landscape paintings Bawden worked on book illustrations and commercial graphics. During World War II he served as an Official War Artist.
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898)
Beardsley grew up in Brighton. Prodigiously talented, he was able to give up his office job in 1892 and work full-time as an illustrator, of Oscar Wilde's Salome, Artistophane’s The Lysistrata, Thomas Malory’s Mort d’Arthur and Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. He also contributed to satirical art magazines. His drawings are quite unique - with influences ranging from Greek vase painting to Japanese prints - and tend to show sexually and socially provocative subjects. He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five.
Domenico Beccafumi (1486?-1551)
Beccafumi was brought up in Siena, apparently worked for a period in Rome, and by 1513 had returned to become the leading painter in his native city. His style was formed by the great Florentine artists of the early 16th century, including Piero di Cosimo and Fra Bartolomeo, as well as Michelangelo. He developed a highly personal style, characterised by vibrant effects of light and colour, and is reckoned among the most individual and powerful of the early Mannerists. In addition to painting altarpieces and frescoes, he designed much of the inlaid marble floor of Siena Cathedral.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Blake was apprenticed to an engraver and later attended the Royal Academy Schools. His visionary paintings and poetry of prophetic and mystical themes never achieved commercial success. As a result, he was largely dependent on the patronage of two men; the clerk Thomas Butts, who paid Blake a wage in return for the bulk of his output from 1799-1810, and the painter John Linnell who helped him from 1818. Early in his career Blake rejected oil painting as a decadent medium, and his preferred techniques were as original as his subject-matter. These included paintings in tempera on canvas and ‘illuminated printing’ which combined text and image in a single copper-plate engraving which was subsequently hand coloured. Towards the end of his life Blake turned to wood engraving, and acquired a group of disciples, including Samuel Palmer, known as ‘The Ancients’.
Peter Blake (born 1932)
Born in Kent, Blake trained at the Royal College of Art. As a student he became fascinated with magazine covers, fairground art and similar popular ephemera. He utilised such material in collages and became a leading figure in British ‘Pop’ art of the 1960s. Blake’s most famous work is the cover design for the Beatles LP, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In 1975 he was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, which sought inspiration from ‘the spirit of the countryside’.
François-Louis-David Bocion (1828-1890)
Bocion was born in Lausanne, and studied in Paris, before returning in 1849 to his native city, where he became professor of drawing at the École Industrielle. He was initially an illustrator and painter of historical subjects. After visiting Italy in 1852 he was drawn to the landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He subsequently specialised in atmospheric landscape views, mainly on and around Lake Geneva. Bocion remained little known during his lifetime, although CH Townshend was an enthusiastic collector of his work.
Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828)
Bonington was born in Nottingham, but his family moved to Calais, where he studied watercolour painting and lithography. He subsequently trained in Paris, at the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros, and began to specialise in landscape and architectural sketching. Bonington encountered the work of John Constable at the Salon in 1824, and subsequently visited London with his friend Eugène Delacroix. He also travelled in Italy. His fluid, atmospheric watercolour landscapes and oil sketches invite comparison with those of Constable and the early works of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681)
Ter Borch was born in Zwolle in the Netherlands, where he studied with his father, also named Gerard. He subsequently studied with Peter de Molijn in Haarlem, and entered the painter’s guild there in 1635. Ter Borch travelled in England, Italy, and probably Spain. In 1645-48 he was in Germany during the negotiations leading to the Peace of Münster, which he commemorated with a group portrait of the delegates. After stays in Amsterdam, the Hague, Delft and Zwolle, in 1654 he settled in Deventer. Ter Borch painted portraits and miniatures, but specialised in genre scenes, usually of stylish ladies or officers in dark interiors.
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
Botticelli was one of the principal Florentine painters of the later 15th century. He was an independent artist by the 1460s, and became closely associated with the Medici family, the effective rulers of Florence. Botticelli excelled as a painter of madonnas and other religious subjects, and produced some of the earliest classicising mythological compositions of the Renaissance. He was also an accomplished portrait painter, and a great illustrator of Dante. In the 1480s, he collaborated with Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. A contemporary praised his ‘virile air’, reason and proportion.
Henry Bowler (1824-1903)
Bowler was born in London and educated at the Government School of Design. He specialised in landscape and genre subjects, and his clean-cut forms and bright, translucent colours strongly suggest the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, although Bowler did not know them personally. He also taught at Stourbridge School of Art, the Government School of Design and the Royal Academy, and worked on several national exhibitions. In 1876 Bowler was appointed Assistant Director of Art at the V&A.
Henri De Braekeleer (1840-1888)
From a family of artists, Braekeleer was born in Antwerp, where he studied at the Academie, and exhibited at the local Salon. He rejected the conventions of Romantic painting in favour of the 17th century Dutch tradition, as represented by Ter Borch, Metsu and Vermeer. Braekeleer specialised in paintings of single figures in an architectural setting, in which unified lighting endows the scenes with a remarkable density. From 1869 until 1876 his slow and meticulous technique was subsidised by a patron. Braekeleer died in obscurity, but his late work was a source of inspiration to Van Gogh.
Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893)
Of English parents, Brown was born in Calais, and trained in Belgium and Paris before settling in England in the mid-1840s. His exhibited works caught the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who introduced him to Pre-Raphaelite artists William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Although not an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Brown contributed to their journal, The Germ. He shared their concern with modern subject-matter, in paintings such as The Last of England and Work. Brown was a partner in William Morris’s company, and painted a cycle of monumental historical paintings in Manchester Town Hall.
Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638)
Brouwer was probably born in the Flemish city of Oudenaarde, where his father was a designer of tapestry cartoons. He was in Amsterdam by 1625, and was an established painter at Antwerp from 1631-2. Brouwer specialised in unsentimental peasant genre scenes, with powerful facial expressions and moral references. His paintings were highly regarded by Rembrandt and Rubens, both of whom collected his work, but are very rare today.
Richard Burchett (1815-1875)
Burchett was born in Brighton and studied at the Birkbeck Mechanics Institute in London before becoming an art master at the Government School of Design. He worked on the decorations of the Palace of Westminster and the dome of the 1862 Great Exhibition building, and exhibited occasionally at the Royal Academy. Burchett was principally a teacher and administrator, and published books on Practical Geometry (1855) and Linear Perspective (1856).
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
Burne-Jones was born and educated in Birmingham. In the 1850s, while studying at Oxford, he met fellow student William Morris. After discovering the writings of John Ruskin the two men decided to devote their lives to art. Burne-Jones sought tuition from Rossetti and in 1862 went to Italy with Ruskin, a trip which influenced him greatly. Burne-Jones painted oil paintings and designed decorative objects such as glass, tapestry, tiles and mosaics. With Morris he set up the furnishing company Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.
Many of the artists and collectors included in the V&A's collections are also featured in The National Gallery's site. Click here to access its full collection index.