Alfred William Rich
Encyclopedia
Alfred William Rich was an English
watercolourist
, teacher and author.
Rich was born between Scaynes Hill
and Lindfield
in Sussex
. His study of art began at the age of eight, as a self-taught student inspired by the examples of Turner
, Old Crome
, and Constable
at the National Gallery
.
His professional art career began as a heraldic
painter from 1870-1890. He studied briefly at the Westminster School of Art
. But it was his six years of drawing from classical casts and from nature at the Slade School of Art, starting in 1890, which led him to his love of landscape and watercolour. He studied first under Alphonse Legros
and subsequently under Professor Fred Brown. He was a member of the New English Art Club
from 1898.
Rich was influenced by the watercolour techniques of Thomas Girtin
, John Sell Cotman
and Peter De Wint
, especially their use of the rich blooms produced by applying a full wash and allowing it to dry undisturbed. But whilst he referred to the earlier school of watercolourists his works are all his own and were created as much as reaction to French Impressionism
but with a peculiarly English slant. As Rich and a number of his contemporaries pointed out (including Roger Fry
and Lawrence Binyon) the English watercolour tradition was what had inspired much of the spontaneity of Impressionism in the first place and was where the English artistic tradition could claim to have inspired some great originality. Rich was an advocate of a natural approach to painting, trying to capture the emotion that a subject provoked, rather than simply repoducing a scene. He had little feeling towards what he termed "exhibition pieces", which he viewed as being overworked. He was critical towards even some of the greatest masters who he believed were often guilty of marring their work by polishing over the traces of their original responses to a scene. He also disliked "pretty pictures", a term which he used to refer to the quaint works produced by some of his contemporaries and used this term as a thinly veiled criticism of the work of Helen Allingham
.
Rich's first public exhibitions were at his studio in Croydon
in 1896, followed by showings at the New English Art Club, the Piccadilly Egyptian Hall, the Alpine Club
, the Carfax Gallery, the Leicester Galleries and Walker's Galleries. He worked on the Selecting Jury of the NEAC from 1904, and was elected to the Council of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers in 1913. He taught and travelled with groups of students, always encouraging them to draw and paint directly from nature rather than copying from classic paintings (contrary to other schools of teaching which emphasized the work of the masters). He eschewed studio work and easels, preferring to work with stretched paper on a board held flat on his knees, seated in a camp chair.
His book Watercolour Painting (1918) was published as part of the popular New Art Library and remained in print for nearly 50 years as a standard work on the subject.
Rich died in Tewkesbury
in 1921. After his death, Walker's Galleries held a retrospective in 1923 and Manchester City Art Gallery a memorial exhibition in 1928. A scholarship in his name was established at the Slade School in 1934 and this is still awarded annually.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
watercolourist
Watercolor painting
Watercolor or watercolour , also aquarelle from French, is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle...
, teacher and author.
Life and work
Scaynes Hill
Scaynes Hill is a village in the civil parish of Lindfield Rural in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. It lies on the A272 road 2.2 miles east of Haywards Heath.-Landmarks:...
and Lindfield
Lindfield, West Sussex
Lindfield is a village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. The parish lies to the north-east of Haywards Heath, of which the village is a part of the built-up area. It stands on the upper reaches of the River Ouse...
in Sussex
Sussex
Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
. His study of art began at the age of eight, as a self-taught student inspired by the examples of Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
, Old Crome
John Crome
John Crome was an English landscape artist of the Romantic era, one of the principal artists of the "Norwich school". He is known as Old Crome to distinguish him from his son, John Berney Crome, who was also a well-known artist.-Life and work:Crome was born in Norwich in Norfolk, the son of a weaver...
, and Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
at the National Gallery
National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...
.
His professional art career began as a heraldic
Heraldry
Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms. Heraldry comes from Anglo-Norman herald, from the Germanic compound harja-waldaz, "army commander"...
painter from 1870-1890. He studied briefly at the Westminster School of Art
Westminster School of Art
The Westminster School of Art was an art school in Westminster, London. It was located at 18 Tufton Street, Deans Yard, Westminster, and was part of the old Architectural Museum.H. M. Bateman described it in 1903 as...
. But it was his six years of drawing from classical casts and from nature at the Slade School of Art, starting in 1890, which led him to his love of landscape and watercolour. He studied first under Alphonse Legros
Alphonse Legros
Alphonse Legros , painter, etcher and sculptor was born in Dijon. His father was an accountant, and came from the neighbouring village of Véronnes....
and subsequently under Professor Fred Brown. He was a member of the New English Art Club
New English Art Club
The New English Art Club was founded in London in 1885 as an alternate venue to the Royal Academy.-History:Young English artists returning from studying art in Paris mounted the first exhibition of the New English Art Club in April 1886...
from 1898.
Rich was influenced by the watercolour techniques of Thomas Girtin
Thomas Girtin
Thomas Girtin was an English painter and etcher. A friend and rival of J. M. W. Turner, Girtin played a key role in establishing watercolour as a reputable art form.-Biography:...
, John Sell Cotman
John Sell Cotman
John Sell Cotman was an English marine and landscape painter, etcher, illustrator and author, one of the leading lights of the Norwich school of artists.-Early life and work:...
and Peter De Wint
Peter De Wint
Peter De Wint was an English landscape painter.De Wint was the son of an English physician of Dutch extraction who had come to England from New York., he was born in Stone, Staffordshire. He moved to London in 1802, and was apprenticed to John Raphael Smith, the mezzotint engraver and portrait...
, especially their use of the rich blooms produced by applying a full wash and allowing it to dry undisturbed. But whilst he referred to the earlier school of watercolourists his works are all his own and were created as much as reaction to French Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
but with a peculiarly English slant. As Rich and a number of his contemporaries pointed out (including Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
and Lawrence Binyon) the English watercolour tradition was what had inspired much of the spontaneity of Impressionism in the first place and was where the English artistic tradition could claim to have inspired some great originality. Rich was an advocate of a natural approach to painting, trying to capture the emotion that a subject provoked, rather than simply repoducing a scene. He had little feeling towards what he termed "exhibition pieces", which he viewed as being overworked. He was critical towards even some of the greatest masters who he believed were often guilty of marring their work by polishing over the traces of their original responses to a scene. He also disliked "pretty pictures", a term which he used to refer to the quaint works produced by some of his contemporaries and used this term as a thinly veiled criticism of the work of Helen Allingham
Helen Allingham
__NOEDITSECTION__Helen Allingham was an English watercolour painter and illustrator of the Victorian era.-Biography:...
.
Rich's first public exhibitions were at his studio in Croydon
Croydon
Croydon is a town in South London, England, located within the London Borough of Croydon to which it gives its name. It is situated south of Charing Cross...
in 1896, followed by showings at the New English Art Club, the Piccadilly Egyptian Hall, the Alpine Club
Alpine Club
The first Alpine Club, founded in London in 1857, was once described as:Today, Alpine clubs stage climbing competitions, operate alpine huts and paths, and are active in protecting the Alpine environment...
, the Carfax Gallery, the Leicester Galleries and Walker's Galleries. He worked on the Selecting Jury of the NEAC from 1904, and was elected to the Council of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers in 1913. He taught and travelled with groups of students, always encouraging them to draw and paint directly from nature rather than copying from classic paintings (contrary to other schools of teaching which emphasized the work of the masters). He eschewed studio work and easels, preferring to work with stretched paper on a board held flat on his knees, seated in a camp chair.
His book Watercolour Painting (1918) was published as part of the popular New Art Library and remained in print for nearly 50 years as a standard work on the subject.
Rich died in Tewkesbury
Tewkesbury
Tewkesbury is a town in Gloucestershire, England. It stands at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Avon, and also minor tributaries the Swilgate and Carrant Brook...
in 1921. After his death, Walker's Galleries held a retrospective in 1923 and Manchester City Art Gallery a memorial exhibition in 1928. A scholarship in his name was established at the Slade School in 1934 and this is still awarded annually.
Selected Paintings
- Circa 1900- Lewes, Sussex, watercolour on paper http://www.manchestergalleries.org/the-collections/search-the-collection/image.php?EMUSESSID=1fe8cbc2deafa5a716f82ecbdaea4c00&imageirn=4599&r=1983127500 - Manchester Art Gallery
- 1901- Fishing boats and figures on a beach, watercolour on paper http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=737421&partid=1&output=People%2f!!%2fOR%2f!!%2f110006%2f!%2f110006-3-9%2f!%2fDonated+by+Mrs+Alfred+William+Rich%2f!%2f%2f!!%2f%2f!!!%2f&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database%2fadvanced_search.aspx¤tPage=1&numpages=10 - British Museum, London
- 1909- St Mary's, Oxford , watercolour on paper http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=12429&searchid=32943- Tate Gallery, London
- 1911- Shillingford Bridge, watercolour on paper http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=23414&searchid=32943 - Tate Gallery, London
- 1913- Shardeloes Park, Bucks, watercolour on paper http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=12428&searchid=32943 - Tate Gallery, London
- 1915- St Mary's', Huntingdon, watercolour on paper http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/fo/visite?srv=mipe&idImgPrinc=1&idFicheOeuvre=43558&provenance=mfc&searchInit=searchArtiste - Musée du LouvreLouvreThe Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
, Paris, Département Des Arts Graphiques - 1921- Gloucestershire landscape, watercolour on paper http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=737433&partid=1&searchText=rich+alfred&numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx¤tPage=3 - British Museum, London
- Undated- A landscape with figures, watercolour on paper http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/18051/object/43625, The British Council's Collection
External links
- Portrait of Rich by Henry Tonks
- Portrait of Rich at work by Sir William Orpen
- Caricature of Rich with Orpen on his knee by Sir William Orpen
- http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/outils-transversaux-2/gdzoom.html?S=0&tx_damzoom_pi1%5Bzoom%5D=1&tx_damzoom_pi1%5BxmlId%5D=020809&tx_damzoom_pi1%5Bback%5D=en%2Fcollections%2Findex-of-works%2Fresultat-collection.html%3Fno_cache%3D1%26S%3D0%26zsz%3D9&cHash=dffda87a581912 Group Portrait of the Café Royal Set by Sir William Orpen with William Nicholson, Orpen, Mrs St George, Walter Sickert, James Pryde, Alfred W Rich, Augustus John and George Moore]
- Government Art Collection
- Tate Gallery
- Department of Prints & Drawings, British Museum