11 facts about Alfred Elmore

Alfred Elmore RA (1815–1881) was a British records and historical genre painter. He was born in Clonakilty, Ireland, the son of Dr. John Richard Elmore, a surgeon who retired from the British Army to Clonakilty.

His relations moved to London, where Elmore studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. His at the forefront works were in the troubadour style of Richard Parkes Bonington, but he soon graduated to religious work, notably The Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, commissioned by Daniel O’Connell for Westland Row Church in Dublin. Between 1840 and 1844 Elmore travelled across Europe, visiting Munich, Venice, Bologna, and Florence.

Elmore seems to have been associated with The Clique, a group of youth artists who motto themselves as followers of Hogarth and David Wilkie. According to his friend William Powell Frith he was aficionado of the group, but since it was most responsive while he was in continental Europe, his involvement was probably short-lived.

Most of Elmore’s higher works were historical narrative paintings. Religious Controversy and The Novice were implicitly anti-Catholic in character. Other paintings set episodes from Shakespeare, or the archives of the French Revolution. They often contained subtle explorations of the process of creation, most importantly his two paintings just about technological innovation, The Invention of the Stocking Loom (1847, Nottingham Castle Museum) and The Invention of the Combing Machine (1862, Cartwright Hall, Bradford). Both picture the process of industrialisation by depicting picturesque pre-industrial handicrafts. The inventor is supposed to be pondering these reference book skills even if he forms in his mind a mechanism to replace them.

Elmore’s best-known exploit is On the Brink (1865; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), a moral genre painting depicting a young woman who has loose her grant gambling, and is ‘on the brink’ of responding to the blandishments of a seducer, who is depicted as a satan-like figure, luridly bathed in red light, and whispering corrupting thoughts in her ear.

By the late 1860s Elmore was distressing away from such Hogarthian subjects towards a more classical style influenced by Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. He afterward painted Arabic figures, in line when the vogue for Orientalism in art.

Elmore suffered from neuralgia through much of his life, and in his late years he became lame in imitation of a fall from his horse. He died of cancer in January 1881 and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery in London.