William powell frith biography of christopher

English painter (1819–1909)

William Powell FrithRA (9 January 1819 – 2 November 1909) was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting The Sleeping Model as his Diploma work. He has been described as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth".

Early life

William Powell Frith was born in Aldfield, near Ripon in the then West Riding of Yorkshire on 9 January 1819. He had originally intended to be an auctioneer. His mother was Jane Frith, née Powell (1779–1851). Frith was encouraged to take up art by his father, a hotelier in Harrogate. Frith was great uncle and an advisor to the English school portrait painter Henry Keyworth Raine (1872–1932).

He moved to London in 1835 where he began his formal art studies at Sass's Academy in Charlotte Street, before attending the Royal Academy Schools. Frith started his career as a portrait painter and first exhibited at the British Institution in 1838. In the 1840s he often based works on the literary output of writers such as Charles Dickens, whose portrait he painted (in 1859), and Laurence Sterne.

Career

He was a member of The Clique, which also included Richard Dadd. The principal influence on his work was the hugely popular domestic subjects painted by Sir David Wilkie. Wilkie's famous painting The Chelsea Pensioners was a spur to the creation of Frith's own most famous compositions. Following the precedent of Wilkie, but also imitating the work of his friend Dickens, Frith created complex multi-figure compositions

illiam Powell Frith’s long life of ninety years spanned the period in which ‘being an artist’ changed from a labourers’ job, not far different from that of a house painter, to a position which brought not only gentlemanly wealth and status, but the possibility of being enobled by the Queen. He gained the first two goals, but not the third, and before his death in 1909 the outlook for artists changed again. They suffered a dramatic fall from popularity and another period of relative obscurity ensued until a revival of interest gradually gathered pace from the 1960s onwards.

Early life and training

Frith's self-portrait, aged about 19. [Click on
all the images to enlarge them, and for
more information about them.]

W.P Frith was born in Yorkshire on 9 January 1819, the son of an innkeeper, four months before the birth of the future Queen Victoria. As a boy Frith had no intention of becoming an artist. However his father saw promise in his son’s drawings and took him to London to study under Mr Sass, who could train him for the Royal Academy School. Frith, then aged sixteen, found London dirty and unattractive and was rather bored by his new life and the rigorous work schedule. However he persisted and was awarded a medal by the Society of Arts in 1835. Two years later he became a student at the Royal Academy where he formed a sketch club, later known as The Clique, with some fellow students who all remained good friends until their deaths. Frith himself found that painting portraits, even if he sold them for as little as five pounds, was a way of making money in what was a difficult environment.

Frith’s father died in 1837 and his mother came to London to live with her son. The fashion of the day was to illustrate scenes from literature so Frith tried his hand at Walter Scott and Shakespeare, to only moderate success. It was not until 1842 that he had his first break-through at the Royal Academy, when his painting of a subject from The Vicar of Wakefield by

From Booklist

In this amiably chatty portrait, Wood introduces William Powell Frith, one of the most popular and yet long-forgotten Victorian painters. No great visionary but rather a skilled draftsman famous in his day for crowd scenes that illuminated the strata of the British class system, Frith was one of the first painters of modern life, as opposed to historical subjects, and among the first to become rich. His exact contemporary, Queen Victoria, was a fan, although in later life she failed to reward him with a title, perhaps because she had caught wind of the painter's secret domestic situation: he kept a mistress, had several children by her, and later married her after his first wife died. Happily, Wood emulates Frith's best quality: he was a magnificent raconteur, telling lively, delightfully detailed stories about the London art world and literary circles. Friends with Dickens, Frith testified in the Whistler v. Ruskin trial, and hung out with the cartoonists of Punch. He must have been excellent company; Wood's biography certainly is. Kevin Nance
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