Henry Wallis
Encyclopedia
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...
Pre-Raphaelite painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and collector
Collecting
The hobby of collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual collector. Some collectors are generalists, accumulating merchandise, or stamps from all countries of the world...
.
Born in 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...
on 21 February 1830, his father's name and occupation are unknown. When in 1845 his mother, Mary Anne Thomas, married Andrew Wallis, a prosperous London architect, Henry took his stepfather's surname. His artistic training was thorough and influential. He was admitted as a probationer to the RA and enrolled in the Painting School in March 1848. He also studied in Paris at Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre
Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre
Charles Gleyre , was a Swiss artist. He took over the studio of Paul Delaroche in 1843 and taught a number of younger artists who became prominent, including Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.His father and mother died when he was eight or nine...
's atelier and at the Academie des Beaux Arts, sometime between 1849 and 1853.
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
in 1856. The painting depicted the impoverished late 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. He died of arsenic poisoning, either from a suicide attempt or self-medication for a venereal disease.-Childhood:...
, who poisoned himself in despair at the age of seventeen, and was considered a romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
hero for many young and struggling artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s in Wallis's day. His method and style in Chatterton reveal the importance of his connection to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, seen in the vibrant colours and careful build-up of symbolic detail. He used a bold colour scheme with a contrasting palette and he exploited the fall of the natural light through the window of the garret to implement his much loved style at the time, chiaroscuro. The size of Chatterton's garret was only fractionally larger than the scope of the painting, with room for Wallis and his easel and little else during the preliminary sketches, which were done on-site. The painting is 25x37" and presently 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...
. His next major work, The Stonebreaker
The Stonebreaker
The Stonebreaker is an 1857 oil-on-canvas painting by Henry Wallis. It depicts a manual labourer who appears to be asleep, worn out by his work, but has actually been worked to death....
(1857, exhibited in 1858), consolidated his reputation as a true Pre-Raphaelite. In total, he showed 35 exhibits at the RA, but later in life developed a greater interest in watercolour painting. He was elected a full member of the RWS (Royal Watercolour Society) in 1878 and exhibited over 80 watercolours at the society.
The model for his acclaimed "Death of Chatterton" was the young George Meredith
George Meredith
George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.- Life :Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two...
, the famous author of whom Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
was a big fan, and acknowledged in his work "The Decay of Lying
The Decay of Lying
"The Decay Of Lying - An Observation" is an essay by Oscar Wilde included in his collection of essays titled Intentions, published in 1891. This is a significantly revised version of the article that first appeared in the January 1889 issue of The Nineteenth Century.Wilde presents the essay in a...
" with the speech "Ah Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning." Wallis would later have an affair with Meredith's wife.
Wallis' method of painting, especially in the early years of his career, and in particular on "Death of Chatterton", was to do the initial sketch, saturate it in water, use a grey tint to block in the shade, put on the colour and allow it to dry. When firm, he would use a hair pencil to add in the details, for which he is so renowned. For the light, he would touch the area in question with water and then rub it with a piece of bread. His studio during these years was in Chelsea, a very bohemian and out of the way part of London at the time.
He died, almost blind, at 1 Walpole Road, Croydon, on 20 December 1916.
Selected bibliography
- Hamlin, Robin: Henry Wallis, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 57, London 2004, pp. 13–14.
- van de Put, A. Henry Wallis, 1830–1916, Faenza, v (1917), pp. 33–8.
- Ramm, John 'The Forgotten Pre-Raphaelite', 'Antique Dealer & Collectors Guide' , March/April 2003, Vol 56, 8&9.
- Treuherz, J. Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (London, 1987), pp. 36–39.
- Literary treatment in Peter AckroydPeter AckroydPeter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award...
's novel, Chatterton, first published in 1987.
External links
- Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource includes several works of art by Henry Wallis
- Henry Wallis at Artcyclopedia
- Henry Wallis at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
- The Pre-Raph Pack Discover more about the artists, the techniques they used and a timeline spanning 100 years.