Biography
Inchbold was born 29 April 1830 at Leeds, where his father, Thomas Inchbold, was proprietor and editor of the Leeds Intelligencer. Having shown an early talent for drawing he moved to London and became as a draughtsman in the lithographic works of Day and Haghe.
He became a pupil of Louis Haghe, the water-colour painter, and was a student at the Royal Academy in 1847. He exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1849, at the Academy from 1851. At first he worked in watercolour in a free style, but his first exhibited oil painting, shown at the Academy in 1852 seems to have shown the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and in 1855 he gained the enthusiastic praise of John Ruskin for The Moorland, which was painted in illustration of a famous passage from Tennyson's Locksley Hall. His White Doe of Rylstone was purchased by Ruskin.
He spent much of the later part of his life abroad, mainly in Switzerland, where he had spent some time with Ruskin in the mid-1850s.
His best-known works are probably The Jungfrau (1857), On the Lake of Thun (1860), Tintagel (1862), Gordale Scar (1876) and Drifting (1883); the last named was once in the possession of Coventry Patmore. Tennyson, Browning, Lord Houghton, and Sir Henry Thompson were among his admirers and supporters, and in Dr. Russell Reynolds he found a liberal and discriminating patron. A year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent. He died suddenly of heart disease at Headingly, near Leeds, on 23 January. 1888. His memory was honoured by Swinburne in a funereal ode.
He published a book of sonnets called Annus Amoris in 1876.
Read more about this topic: John William Inchbold
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