1808-1886
Thomas Chambers Galleries Related Paintings of Thomas Chambers :. | View of Cold Spring and Mount Taurus about 1850 | Niagara Falls viewed from Goat Island | The Cascatelli ivoli, Looking Towards Rome | Capture of H.B.M.Frigate Macedonian by U.S.Frigate United States | Threatening Sky at the Bay of New York | Related Artists:
IBBETSON, Julius CaesarEnglish Painter, 1759-1817
English painter, printmaker and writer. The son of a clothier, he was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull; in 1775 Ibbetson became a scene-painter there. In 1777 he moved to London, where he worked as a scene-painter and picture restorer. He married about three years later. From 1785 he exhibited landscapes, genre scenes and portraits at the Royal Academy. In 1787-8 Ibbetson was personal draughtsman to Col. Charles Cathcart on the first British Mission to Beijing, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. His watercolour False Bay, Cape of Good Hope (London, V&A), made on this journey, shows a picturesque roughness of foliage and rustic staffage adapted from his English landscape style. Cathcart's death forced Ibbetson to return to England (he exhibited an oil painting, untraced, of the Burial of Col. Cathcart in Java at the Royal Academy in 1789); thereafter he lived by painting landscape oils and watercolours, the subjects culled from his frequent tours. He painted occasional portraits throughout his career (e.g. Young Man, 1790; Leeds, Temple Newsam House) and contributed to John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (e.g. Scene from 'The Taming of the Shrew', untraced, see Waterhouse, p. 192). In 1789 he stayed with John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, at Cardiff Castle and visited the Isle of Wight in 1790. In 1792 he toured Wales and the surrounding area with the painter John 'Warwick' Smith and his companion Robert Fulke Greville, resulting in the publication of his book of engravings, A Picturesque Guide (1793). His oil painting of Aberglasyn: The Flash of Lightning (Leeds, C.A.G.) evokes the sublimity of the mountainous Welsh terrain; the drama of the storm over Aberglasyn is conveyed by thick impasto and strong chiaroscuro, a way of handling paint that Ibbetson learnt from copying 17th-century Dutch masters while working for a London dealer named Clarke during the late 1770s and early 1780s.
Ranney William TyleeGerman-born American Painter, 1813-1857
American painter. He spent six formative years in the hill country of North Carolina. By 1834 he was working and studying drawing in New York, but two years later he went to Texas to join in the war for independence. Although he returned to New York a year later, it was not until 1846, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, that Ranney began to use his Western experience as the basis for his painting. With the encouragement of the American Art Union, he executed three types of Western subject: the Western trapper or hunter, pursuing a dangerous life on the prairies, as in Trapper's Last Shot (1850; untraced; engraved and lithographed by T. Dwight Booth); the pioneer family, heading across the plains with children, dogs and goods, as in Advice on the Prairie (1853; Malvern, PA, Claude J. Ranney priv. col.); and the dangers of emigration, for example Prairie Fire.
Aubrey BeardsleyEnglish Art Nouveau/Golden Age Illustrator, 1872-1898
English draughtsman and writer. He was brought up in Brighton, in genteel poverty, by his mother. She gave her children an intensive education in music and books, and by the time he was sent to boarding-school at the age of seven Beardsley was exceptionally literate and something of a musical prodigy. He was also already infected with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. There is evidence that his talent for drawing was highly developed by the age of ten, and he was subsequently encouraged by his housemaster at Brighton Grammar School, Arthur William King. Beardsley left school at the end of 1888, and in January 1889 became a clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company in the City of London. Attacks of haemorrhaging of the lungs forced him to abandon his job at the end of 1889. On the strength of a short story sold to Tit Bits he tried to pursue a literary career, but when his health improved in the spring of 1890, he returned both to his job and to drawing. Final affirmation of the direction of his art came in July 1891, when he showed his work to Edward Burne-Jones, who told Beardsley: 'I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.