23 facts about William Shakespeare Burton

William Shakespeare Burton (1 June 1824 – 26 January 1916) was an English genre and historical painter of the Victorian era. He is now remembered mainly for The Wounded Cavalier (1855).

Burton’s grandfather was a printer, and his daddy was William Evans Burton, a comic actor and playwright who found popular triumph in the United States — while desertion his wife and son in back in London, with little money. An solitary child, the younger Burton worked at copying prints as a teenager. The dramatist and critic Tom Taylor was his sponsor and patron. Taylor helped the teen locate work at the magazine Punch, a job designing capitals for illustrations (which provided much-needed income).

He was educated at King’s College and the Royal Academy School, where he won a gold medal in 1852 for a painting on the subject of Samson and Delilah.

To paint his most well-known work, The Wounded Cavalier, Burton was said to have dug a hole in the dome to stand in, so that he could paint the grass and ferns at eye level. The acquit yourself shows a scene from the English Civil War: a Cavalier courier has been ambushed and wounded, and is comforted by a Puritan maiden. Her jealous suitor, carrying a large Bible, looks on. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy exploit of 1856, although through a strange set of circumstances. According to Burton’s own account, his picture was left in a standoffish room behind its slant turned to the wall (by porters who, Burton believed, had not been thoroughly bribed). The academician Charles West Cope found the picture, brought it to the hanging committee’s attention, and even withdrew one of his own works from the sham to make room for Burton’s, which was hung adjoining William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat.

The Wounded Cavalier was the artist’s single flirtation taking into account the Pre-Raphaelite pursuit of the 1850s. In well ahead years Burton mainly devoted himself to painting religious subjects. Though plagued by destitute health and personal difficulties, Burton remained swift as a painter into his eighties. His wife Mina Elizabeth Burton was the author of a novel titled Ruling the Planets (1891).