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Tag Archives: Royal Watercolour Society


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Birth of Mildred Anne Butler, Animal & Genre Painter

Mildred Anne Butler, Irish artist who works in watercolour and oil of landscape, genre and animal subjects, is born on January 11, 1858, in Kilmurry, a Georgian house near Thomastown, County Kilkenny.

The youngest daughter of Captain Henry Butler, a grandson of the Edmund Butler, 11th Viscount Mountgarret, and Clara Butler (née Taylor) of the Newarke, Leicester, England. Her father is himself an enthusiastic painter, known for his publication South African sketches: illustrative of the wildlife of a hunter on the frontier of Cape Colony (1841). Her early artistic efforts are mainly copies of romantic subjects, but the influence of the London artist Paul Jacob Naftel, with whom she begins corresponding in the early 1880s, proves to be crucial to her artistic development. Studies with William Frank Calderon, an expert in animal painting, are also significant. She subsequently spends the summers of 1894 and 1895 in Newlyn, Cornwall, England, with the Irish artist Norman Garstin, who introduces her to contemporary French painting.

In 1885, Butler makes her first visit to the continent, traveling through France, Switzerland, and Italy. From 1905 to 1914 she travels regularly to Europe, most particularly Aix-les-Bains and Wiesbaden, during which time she produces genre views of French and German villages. After 1914 her life at the family home is interrupted only by visits to London exhibitions. She is best known for her paintings of Kilmurry and its environs, many of which display an interest in botany. Much of her work is dominated by detailed representations of animals and birds, often drawn from photographs and stuffed specimens.

Butler’s career as an exhibitor begins in 1882 with the Irish Fine Arts Society, later known as the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI), with which she has a long association. She exhibits regularly with the society from 1892 onward and is a member of its committee for many years. She is also closely associated with the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery in London. Her work is first shown there in 1888, and on this evidence, she is elected to their society. The purchase by the Chantrey bequest for the Tate Gallery of The Morning Bath for £50 in 1896 is a high point in her career. The first painting by a woman to be selected by the council, its purchase is followed by almost consistently good press reviews for her work. The Athenaeum of May 5, 1897, writes: “The young lady knows how to look at her subjects with the eyes of a well-trained artist.”

Butler also comes to the attention of the American artistic press. She contributes to the portfolio of drawings given by the Society of Lady Artists to Princess May on her marriage to the Duke of York in 1893, while in 1922 her work is included in the portfolio presented to Princess Mary on her marriage. Her patrons include Queen Alexandra, and the grand duke of Hesse, who purchases two of her paintings after she is invited to exhibit in Hesse Darmstadt in 1911. In 1914 she is made a member of the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts, and in 1921 her paintings are shown in Japan. She regularly exhibits with the Belfast Ramblers, the Royal Ulster Academy, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Society of Lady Artists, and the Royal Watercolour Society, of which she is made an associate member in 1896, and a full member in 1937.

In her later years, severe rheumatism prevents Butler from painting. She has a keen interest in music. She survives all five of her siblings, and inherits Kilmurry, where she dies on October 11, 1941. She is buried at Thomastown, County Kilkenny. Her paintings are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, the Ulster Museum, and the Tate, London.

(From: “Butler, Mildred Anne” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Rose Maynard Barton, Watercolour Artist

Rose Maynard Barton RWS, Anglo-Irish artist, dies on October 10, 1929, at her house at 79 Park Mansions, Knightsbridge, London. A watercolourist, she paints landscape, street scenes, gardens, child portraiture and illustrations of the townscape of Britain and Ireland.

Barton exhibits with a number of different painting societies, most notably the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI), the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Society of Women Artists (SWA) and the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS). She becomes a full member of the RWS in 1911.

Barton is born in Dublin on April 21, 1856. Her father is a lawyer from Rochestown, County Tipperary, and her mother’s family is from County Galway. Educated privately, she is a liberal in social affairs. Her interests include horse racing. She is cousins with sisters Eva Henrietta and Letitia Marion Hamilton. She begins exhibiting her broad-wash watercolour paintings with the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) in 1872. She and her sister Emily visit Brussels in 1875, where they receive drawing tuition in drawing and fine art painting under the French artist Henri Gervex. There, along with her close friend Mildred Anne Butler, she begins to study figure painting and figure drawing.

In 1879, Barton joins the local committee of the Irish Fine Art Society. Afterward she trains at Paul Jacob Naftel‘s art studio in London. She, like Butler, studies under Naftel. In 1882, she exhibits her painting Dead Game, at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). In 1884, she exhibits at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA). Later, she shows at the Japanese Gallery, the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery and the Grosvenor Gallery in London. In 1893, she becomes an associate member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, attaining full membership in 1911.

Barton’s watercolours and townscapes become well known in both Dublin and London. This is helped by her illustrations in books of both cities including Picturesque Dublin, Old and New by Francis Farmer and her own book Familiar London.

Barton’s paintings can be found in public collections of Irish painting in both Ireland and Britain, including the National Gallery of Ireland and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in Dublin, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

(Pictured: “A rest in rotten row” – 1892 watercolour by Rose Maynard Barton. The painting shows a nurse and child resting on Rotten Row, Hyde Park, London.)


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Birth of Irish Painter Sir Frederic William Burton RHA

Irish painter Sir Frederic William Burton RHA is born in County Wicklow on April 8, 1816. The third son of Samuel Frederick Burton and his wife Hanna Mallett, he is taken by his parents to live in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland at the age of six. The old Burton seat is Clifden House, Corofin, County Clare, which is built around the middle of the eighteenth century. The artist’s grandparents were Major Edward William Burton, Clifden, who was High Sheriff of Clare in 1799, and his wife, Jane Blood of nearby Roxton, County Clare. In his youth he has strong sympathy with the Young Ireland movement.

Educated in Dublin, Burton is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of twenty-one and an academician two years later. In 1842 he begins to exhibit at the Royal Academy. A visit to Germany and Bavaria in 1842 is the first of a long series of trips to various parts of Europe, which give him a profound knowledge of the works of the Old Masters. From 1851 he spends seven years working as a painter in the service of Maximilian II of Bavaria.

Burton works with George Petrie on archaeological sketches and is on the council of the Royal Irish Academy and the Archaeological Society of Ireland. He is elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1855, and a full member in the following year. He resigns in 1870 and is reelected as an honorary member in 1886.

In 1874 Burton is appointed the third director of the National Gallery, London, in succession to Sir William Boxall RA. In June 1874, he obtains a special grant to acquire the art collection of Alexander Barker, which includes Piero della Francesca‘s Nativity and Sandro Botticelli‘s Venus and Mars. In 1876 a bequest of 94 paintings, mainly by Dutch artists but also including works by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Dieric Bouts and Canaletto, is made by the British haberdasher Wynne Ellis. Also, in this year an extension to the Gallery by Edward Middleton Barry is completed.

During the twenty years that Burton holds this post he is responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci‘s Virgin of the Rocks, Raphael‘s Ansidei Madonna, Anthony van Dyck‘s Equestrian portrait of Charles I, Hans Holbein the Younger‘s Ambassadors, and the Admiral Pulido Pareja, by Diego Velázquez (this subsequently attributed to Velázquez’s assistant Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo). He also adds to the noted series of Early Italian pictures in the gallery. The number of acquisitions made to the collection during his period of office exceeds 500.

Burton’s best-known watercolours, The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (1841) and The Meeting on Turret Stairs (1864) are in the National Gallery of Ireland. The Meeting on Turret Stairs is voted by the Irish public as Ireland’s favourite painting in 2012 from among ten works shortlisted by critics. A knighthood is conferred on him in 1884, and the degree of LL.D. of Dublin in 1889.

Burton dies in Kensington, West End of London on March 16, 1900, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.

(Pictured: “Sir Frederic William Burton,” painting by Henry Tanworth Wells (died 1903), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1913)


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Birth of Artist Thomas James Carr

Thomas James Carr, British artist who is associated with the Euston Road School in the 1930s and has a long career as a painter of domestic scenes and landscapes, is born in Belfast to a well-to-do family on September 21, 1909.

Carr attends Oundle School where his art masters include E.M.O’R. Dickey and Christopher Perkins. In 1927 Carr moves to London where he studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. After two years at the Slade, he moves to Italy and spends six months in Florence. Upon returning to London, he establishes himself as a well-regarded painter of domestic scenes.

Although essentially a realist painter, Carr is included in the 1934 Objective Abstractionists exhibition at Zwemmer’s Gallery. In 1937, he shares an exhibition with Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers at the Storran Gallery and subsequently becomes associated with the representational style of the Euston Road School. Starting in 1940, at Georges Wildenstein‘s gallery, he holds a series of one-man exhibitions at various galleries including at the Leicester Galleries, The Redfern Gallery and also at Thomas Agnew & Sons.

In 1939, Carr returns to Northern Ireland and settles in Newcastle, County Down. During the World War II, he receives a small number of commissions from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to depict parachute manufacture and the Short Sunderland flying boats being built at the Short Brothers factory in Belfast.

After the war, Carr teaches at the Belfast College of Art and moves to Belfast in 1955. After the death of his wife in 1995, he moves to Norfolk, England to be nearer one of his three daughters and her family. He continues to paint into old age and tends to concentrate on landscape painting.

Carr is a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts and is a member of the Royal Ulster Academy, the New English Art Club, the Royal Watercolour Society and is an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Queen’s University awards him an honorary doctorate in 1991. For his services to art in Northern Ireland, he is awarded the MBE in 1974 and receives an OBE in 1993.

Thomas Carr dies at the age of 89 in Norwich, England on February 17, 1999.

(Pictured: “Making Coloured Parachutes” by Thomas James Carr (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/4674) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)