THE PAINTINGS GALLERIES

Artist Biographies T-Z

Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804)

Tiepolo was born in Venice, the son and student of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. He collaborated with his father, and accompanied him to Germany in 1750, and subsequently to Spain, before returning to his native city. He also specialised in monumental wall paintings, and his most characteristic works are his frescoes in the Valmarana villa and in his own villa at Ziangino.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770)

Tiepolo was born and trained in Venice. He admired the achievements of the great Venetian masters of the 16th century, principally Tintoretto and Veronese, and also studied the work of a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque masters. An accomplished draughtsman and etcher, he was also a master of small-scale oil sketches. In the monumental fresco paintings in which he excelled, Tiepolo united diverse pictorial sources in an exceptionally rich synthesis, enlivened by a theatrical sense of composition and extravagant expression and gesture. He became the most brilliant and sought-after Italian decorative painter of the 18th century, and in 1756 was elected president of the Venetian academy. After initially working on religious and secular cycles in his native Venice, in 1750-53 he went to Germany. His ceiling paintings in the Residenz of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg are, arguably, his greatest achievement. In 1762 he was summoned to work for the King of Spain, in Madrid, where he died.

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594)

Tintoretto was born and worked almost entirely in Venice. He may have studied with Andrea Schiavone and by the 1540s was an independent artist, working principally on large religious narrative paintings. His rich use of colour indicates the influence of Titian and his dramatic foreshortening and emphatic gestures suggest a knowledge of Michelangelo. In 1565 Tintoretto was elected to the confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, for which he painted his principal works, a series of monumental paintings of the Old Testament and the life of Christ. His last commission was the Paradise ceiling for the Sala dei Maggior Consiglio of the Doge’s Palace. Such large projects necessitated a considerable workshop establishment, which included his sons Domenico and Marco, as well as his daughter Marietta. Tintoretto was one of the principal Venetian painters of his generation, and his work has a unique dramatic power, defying Renaissance conventions of design, colour and technique. He was also a distinguished portrait painter. After Titian’s death, he received prestigious commissions from the Duke of Mantua, the Emperor and the King of Spain.

Chauncey Hare Townshend (1798-1868)

Townshend was born at Godalming, the son of a landowner. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and took holy orders, although he never practised his vocation. A poet, essayist and writer on mesmerism, Townshend was a friend of John Forster and Charles Dickens, who dedicated Great Expectations to him. He was apparently the model for the collector ‘Mr Fairlie’ in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Townshend travelled extensively in Scotland and usually spent his winters in Lausanne. Townshend’s bequest to the V&A included over 350 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, many ‘by the best painters of Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland’ of the 1840s and 1850s, over 600 prints, and a major group of early photographs.

George Travers (exhibited 1851-1865)

Travers lived in London and exhibited six paintings at the Royal Academy between 1854 and 1865, nine at the Society of British Artists and eleven at the British Institution. He specialised in British landscapes whose locations included Essex, Jersey, Wales and Scotland.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

Turner was born in London. Precocious, and initially self-taught, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, and exhibited from 1790. He made the first of many sketching tours in 1792, and the following year his watercolours began to attract critical attention. In 1796 Turner exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy, where he became a full Academician in 1802, Professor of Perspective in 1807, and Deputy President in 1845. Having toured Wales, the Lake District and Scotland, he visited France and Switzerland in 1802. Thereafter, the Napoleonic Wars prevented Turner from travelling abroad until 1817, when his tour of the Low Countries initiated a long series of sketching visits to Belgium, Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. His late works represent his fullest expression of the atmospheric and luminary qualities of landscape. John Ruskin praised Turner’s ability to represent ‘the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts’. His patrons included the nobility as well as industrialists, and many of his works were reproduced as engravings. He bequeathed his unsold oils, watercolours and sketchbooks to the nation, and they are now housed at Tate Britain.

Thomas Unwins (1782-1857)

Unwins was born in London and apprenticed to an engraver. He worked initially as a watercolourist, miniaturist and portrait painter, and as a book illustrator. Between 1820 and 1831 he lived in Scotland and Italy, and after his return specialised in Italian genre scenes. He served as Librarian of the Royal Academy, Surveyor of The Queens’s Paintings and Keeper of the National Gallery.

James Ward (1769-1859)

Ward was born in London and trained as an engraver. He worked initially as a highly successful mezzotinter, producing reproductive prints of paintings by other artists. From 1790 he began to produce oil paintings on his own account. Ward initially produced rustic scenes in the manner of his brother-in-law George Morland, but subsequently produced more ambitious compositions of animals fighting in landscapes, under the influence of Peter Paul Rubens. Around 1810 he began painting portraits of horses, and emerged as the most important animal painter of his generation. From 1815 Ward devoted much time to the monumental Waterloo Allegory, which proved a critical failure. Thereafter, he became increasingly estranged from the art world, and died in poverty.

Henry Warren (1794-1879)

Warren was a painter of oriental and biblical subjects, and was also an illustrator of literary and landscape subjects. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1818. He specialised in large and elaborate watercolours, often with literary and Biblical themes, but apparently never visited the Near East.

George Frederick Watts (1817-1904)

As a young man, Watts demonstrated considerable talent, and won a prize in the 1843 competition to provide decorative paintings for Westminster Hall. He studied in Florence and was deeply influenced by the work of Michelangelo. Watts devoted himself to grand, universal themes, while earning a living from portraiture of eminent men. The Ionides family were major patrons throughout his career. He was briefly married to the actress Ellen Terry.

Thomas Webster (1800-1886)

Webster was born in London. He was a Chorister in the Chapel Royal, and trained at the Royal Academy. Webster initially favoured portraiture and historical subjects, but after 1827 increasingly specialised in genre scenes of children at school and village life. These were much admired, and widely disseminated as engravings. In 1856 he moved to Kent, where he became the senior member of the Cranbrook Colony of painters.

Benjamin West (1738-1820)

West was born in Springfield, Pennsylvania but left America for Italy in 1760, and in 1763 set up in London as a painter. He achieved considerable success, becoming in 1768 History Painter to King George III. He was elected second President of the Royal Academy in 1792, following the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In later life, he turned increasingly to landscapes and other smaller and less ambitious subjects.

David Wilkie (1785-1841)

Wilkie was born in Scotland. He trained in Edinburgh and in London at the Royal Academy Schools. His Village Politicians was exhibited to huge acclaim in 1806. Wilkie’s meticulously painted scenes of peasant life were based upon Dutch and Flemish 17th century pictures. They enjoyed the patronage of Sir George Beaumont, the Prince Regent, and other influential clients. In 1822 he painted for the Duke of Wellington The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch, which created a sensation at the Royal Academy. In the 1820s, he travelled in Europe, and was influenced by 17th century Spanish paintings and French Romantic artists. He died on the return from a visit to the Holy Land.

 

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