Henry Thomas Alken - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Henry Thomas Alken was an English

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...

painter and engraver chiefly known as a caricaturist and illustrator of sporting subjects and coaching scenes. His most prolific period of painting and drawing occurred between 1816 and 1831.

Life

Alken was born on 12 October 1785 in Soho London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

and baptised on November 6 at St James's Church, Piccadilly. He was the third son of Samuel Alken

Samuel Alken

Samuel Alken Sr. was an English artist.-History:Samuel Alken entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, as a sculptor in 1772...

, a sporting artist. Two of his brothers were George, Samuel Jr (also an artist) and Sefferien John. In 1789, Henry's family moved to 2 Francis Street East, Bedford Square.

Young Henry first studied under his father and then with the miniature painter John Thomas Barber Beaumont

John Thomas Barber Beaumont

John Thomas Barber Beaumont was a British army officer, painter, author, and philanthropist...

(1774–1841), also known as J.T. Barber. In 1801, Alken sent a miniature portrait of Miss Gubbins to the Royal Academy Exhibition. He exhibited a second miniature at the Royal Academy before abandoning miniature painting and taking on painting and illustrating. Early in his career, he painted sporting subjects under the name of "Ben Tally-O". Alken married Maria Gordon on October 14, 1809 at St. Clement’s Parish Church in Ipswich. On August 22 a year later the couple's first son was baptised. Alken went on to father five children, two of whom were artists, Samuel Henry, also a sporting artist and known as Henry Alken junior, and Sefferien junior.

From about 1816 onwards Alken "produced an unending stream of paintings, drawings and engravings of every type of field and other sporting activity," and his soft-ground etchings were often colored by hand. When Alken was 26, he and his young family lived over a shop in Haymarket

Haymarket

-United Kingdom:* Haymarket , street in Westminster, London* Newcastle Haymarket, section of Newcastle upon Tyne city centre, England** Haymarket bus station, bus station in Newcastle upon Tyne, above* Haymarket, Edinburgh, area of Edinburgh, Scotland...

that belonged to print publisher Thomas McLean of the "Repository of Wit and Humour." Mclean paid Alken a daily wage of 30s, considered a good salary at the time.

Alken died in April 1851 and was buried in Highgate cemetery

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery is a cemetery located in north London, England. It is designated Grade I on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. It is divided into two parts, named the East and West cemetery....

. Although fairly affluent for most of his career, he fell on hard times towards the end of his life and was buried at his daughter's expense.

Work

Alken worked in both oil

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

and watercolor and was a skilled etcher. His earliest productions were published anonymously under the signature of "Ben Tallyho", but in 1816 he issued The Beauties & Defects in the Figure of the Horse comparatively delineated under his own name. From this date until about 1831, he produced many sets of etchings of sporting subjects mostly coloured and sometimes humorous in character, the principal of which were: Humorous Specimens of Riding 1821, Symptoms of being amazed 1822, Symptoms of being amused 1822, Flowers from Nature 1823, A Touch at the Fine Arts 1824, and Ideas 1830. Besides these he published a series of books: Illustrations for Landscape Scenery and Scraps from the Sketch Book of Henry Alken in 1823, New Sketch Book in 1824, Sporting Scrap Book and Shakespeare's Seven Ages in 1827, Sporting Sketches and in 1831 Illustrations to Popular Songs and Illustrations of Don Quixote, the latter engraved by John Christian Zeitter.

Alken provided the plates picturing hunting

Hunting

Hunting is the practice of pursuing any living thing, usually wildlife, for food, recreation, or trade. In present-day use, the term refers to lawful hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species contrary to applicable law...

, coaching, racing

Racing

A sport race is a competition of speed, against an objective criterion, usually a clock or to a specific point. The competitors in a race try to complete a given task in the shortest amount of time...

and steeplechasing

Steeplechase (horse racing)

The steeplechase is a form of horse racing and derives its name from early races in which orientation of the course was by reference to a church steeple, jumping fences and ditches and generally traversing the many intervening obstacles in the countryside...

for The National Sports of Great Britain (London, 1821). Alken, known as an avid sportsman,is best remembered for his hunting prints, many of which he engraved himself until the late 1830s. (Charles Lane British Racing Prints pp. 75–76). He created prints for the leading sporting printsellers such as S. and J. Fuller, Thomas McLean, and Rudolph Ackermann

Rudolph Ackermann

Rudolph Ackermann was an Anglo-German bookseller, inventor, lithographer, publisher and businessman.- Biography :...

, and often collaborated with his friend the sporting journalist Charles James Apperley

Charles James Apperley

Charles James Apperley , English sportsman and sporting writer, better known as Nimrod, the pseudonym under which he published his works on the chase and on the turf, was born at Plasgronow, near Wrexham, in Denbighshire, North Wales in 1777.- Youth :Charles James Apperley was the second son of...

(1779–1843), also known as Nimrod. Nimrod's Life of a Sportsman, with 32 etchings by Alken, was published by Ackermann in 1842. In many of his etchings, Alken explored the comic side of riding and satirized the foibles of aristocrats, much in the tradition of other early 19th century caricaturists such as Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson was an English artist and caricaturist.- Biography :Rowlandson was born in Old Jewry, in the City of London. He was the son of a tradesman or city merchant. On leaving school he became a student at the Royal Academy...

and James Gillray

James Gillray

James Gillray , was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.- Early life :He was born in Chelsea...

. One of his best known paintings, "The Belvoir Hunt: Jumping Into And Out Of A Lane", hangs in the Tate Britain

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...

and shows one of the oldest of the great foxhound packs in Leicestershire

Leicestershire

Leicestershire is a landlocked county in the English Midlands. It takes its name from the heavily populated City of Leicester, traditionally its administrative centre, although the City of Leicester unitary authority is today administered separately from the rest of Leicestershire...

. A collection of his illustrations can be seen in the print department of the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

Books illustrated by Henry Alken

External links

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Life

Work

Books illustrated by Henry Alken

Further reading

External links