16 facts about James Smetham

James Smetham (9 September 1821 – 5 February 1889) was an English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter and engraver, a devotee of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Smetham was born in Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire, and attended college in Leeds; he was originally apprenticed to the Lincoln architect Edward James Willson before deciding upon an artistic career. He studied at the Royal Academy, beginning in 1843. His modest early execution as a portrait painter was stifled by the move on of photography (a burden shared by further artists of the time). In 1851 Smetham took a teaching turn at the Wesleyan Normal College in Westminster, and was the first Drawing Master for what would forward-looking become Westminster College (today portion of Oxford Brookes University). In 1854, he married Sarah Goble, a fellow scholastic at the College. They would eventually have six children.

Smetham worked in a range of genres, including religious and scholastic themes as capably as portraiture; but he is perhaps best known as a landscape painter. His “landscapes have a visionary quality” reminiscent of the feign of William Blake, John Linnell, and Samuel Palmer. Out of a lifetime output of some 430 paintings and 50 etchings, woodcuts, and collection illustrations, his 1856 painting The Dream is perhaps his best-known measure but his signal operate is The Hymn of the Last Supper a very ambitious subject for him to give a deferential response but one which worked out magnificently. His option of subject was sometimes somewhat bizarre; one of his best paintings is The Death of Earl Siward which depicts the dying earl, dressed in full armour, standing taking place and bodily supported by his servants as ‘He did not wish to die lying down following a cow’.

He was with an essayist and art critic; an article on Blake (in the form of a review of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake), which appeared in the January 1869 concern of the Quarterly Review, influenced and advanced admission of Blake’s artistic importance. Other Smetham articles for the Review were “Religious Art in England” (1861), “The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds” (1866), and “Alexander Smith” (1868). He afterward wrote some poetry.

Smetham was a devout Methodist, and after a mental examination in 1857, the second half of his vigor was marked by a growing religious mania and eventual insanity. “In one of his notebooks he attempted to illustrate every verse in the Bible.” (Smetham habitually created miniature, postage-stamp-sized pen-and-ink drawings, in a process he called “squaring.” He produced thousands of these in his lifetime.) He suffered a definite breakdown in 1877 and lived in seclusion at his home in Stoke Newington until his death.

Smetham’s letters, posthumously published by his widow, throw light on Rossetti, John Ruskin, and additional contemporaries, and have been praised for their instructor and spiritual qualities. His enduring journals and notebooks decree that Smetham practised an a propos stream of consciousness type of writing that he called “ventilating,” as a method of religious self-analysis. These writings delineate the depression that came to dominate Smetham’s outlook.