PREVIOUS ARTISTS OF THE MONTH |
Current Artist of the Month
Object of the Month |
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Artist of the Month - July 2007
Sandra Blow RA (1925 - 2006)
I have two equal sources of inspiration. One is art, first the Renaissance art I saw in Italy at the same time I saw the work of Alberto Burri and Nicolas Carone... and later African sculpture and, among other painters, Roger Hilton and Morris Louis. The second influence is nature. I marvel at the beauty and construction of the leaves and flowers outside the studio. I love London skies, because they are framed and one sees them almost like a painting. Sandra Blow
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Artist of the Month - August 2007
William Cheselden (1688-1752)
William Cheselden was a pioneering anatomist and surgeon. In 1733 he published his Osteographia, a comprehensive study of the human skeleton. Every bone in the human body is illustrated in the book, along with a section on bone disease and comparative material on animal skeletons.
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Artist of the Month - September 2007
Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727-1788)
Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727. He trained in London under Hubert Gravelot and probably also with Francis Hayman RA. He returned to Suffolk in 1748 and began to make his reputation painting portraits. In 1759 he moved to the fashionable spa town of Bath, where sitters were plentiful enough to allow him to make a lucrative practice.
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Artist of the Month - October 2007
Jean Cooke RA (1927-2008)
Jean Cooke studied at Central School of Arts and Crafts and at the Royal College of Art. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Establishment Club in 1963. Jean Cooke has painted many portraits of her family and explored her own image through a series of self-portraits, of which the Royal Academy have three in their collection.
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Artist of the Month - November 2007
William Quiller Orchardson RA (1832-1910)
Born in Edinburgh and trained at the Trustees' Academy in the city. From 1845 onwards he joined a circle of young artists - including William McTaggart, John Pettie and Thomas Graham. After moving to London in 1862 he exhibited at the Royal Academy where his portraits and his paintings of historical and literary subjects were well-received.
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Artist of the Month - December 2007
William Owen RA (1769-1825)
Owen's career was founded on his reputation as a portraitist. Although he lacked the panache of contemporaries like Sir Thomas Lawrence, he could boast a list of distinguished sitters and a prodigious output. Arriving in 1786, Owen studied with the coach painter Charles Catton RA and also met Sir Joshua Reynolds who was impressed with his work.
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Artist of the Month - January 2008
Stanhope Forbes RA (1857-1947)
In the later part of the 19th century artists such as Stanhope Forbes settled in Newlyn in Cornwall and were soon referred to as the Newlyn School. Forbes lived there from the early 1880s with other arists who were committed to painting plein-air, or in the open, whenever possible.
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Artist of the Month - February 2008
Benjamin West PRA (1738-1820)
Benjamin West was born in Pennsylvania and came to London after studying in Italy between 1760 and 1763. He quickly developed an extremely successful practice which included both history painting and portraiture. George III commission a great deal of work from West to decorate his royal palaces, such as Windsor Castle.
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Artist of the month - March 2008
Richard Norman Shaw RA (1831-1912)
Look around any English city, town or suburb built up between 1880 and 1930 and you will see traces of the ghost of Norman Shaw. Here a flamboyant corner pub with a turret thrusting up blithely into the roofline. All bear the indirect impress of one of the masters of English architecture.
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Artist of the month - April 2008
Richard Westall, RA (1765-1836)
Richard Westall is best known as a painter of genre works, historical and literary scenes and portraits, including several portraits of Lord Byron, whose poems he illustrated. In the last nine years of his life he was drawing master to Princess Victoria, but by this time his work had fallen out of favour and he died in penury..
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Artist of the Month - May 2008
Thomas Webster RA (1800-1886)
Webster trained at the Royal Academy Schools from 1821 and gained great popularity in his lifetime for scenes of contemporary rural life. Webster moved to the village of Cranbrook in 1857 and he was soon followed by other artists such as John Callcott Horsley, F.D. Hardy and G.B. O'Neill, so that by the 1860s it was recognised as an artists' colony.
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Artist of the Month - June 2008
J. F. Lewis RA (1804-1876)
John Frederick Lewis is best known for his glittering scenes of Oriental life depicting men and women in elaborate costumes, set either in decorative interiors, in sunlit deserts or in Cairo's crowded streets. One of the first professional British artists to travel to the Middle East, Lewis spent a decade living in the Egyptian capital where he adopted local dress and inhabited a grand Ottoman house.
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Artist of the Month - July 2008
Sir Richard Westmacott RA (1775-1856)
Westmacott was an immensely successful sculptor receiving many public and private commissions. He studied from the age of 14 with his grandfather, Thomas Vardy, a furniture carver and then continued his education by travelling to Rome in 1792 and studying antique sculpture for four years. He became well acquainted with the neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822).
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Artist of the Month - August 2008
Robert Walker Macbeth RA (1848-1910)
Macbeth painted contemporary scenes of rural and fishing communities as well as historical genre scenes in the manner of William Quiller Orchardson. He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy School before moving to London in 1870 where he began to work for The Graphic and also attended the Royal Academy Schools.
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Artist of the Month - September 2008
Thomas Daniell RA (1749-1840)
Thomas Daniell attended the Royal Academy Schools before travelling to India with his nephew William. The pair drew and painted many different landscapes and ancient sites during their ten-year stay in India. Upon returning to Britain the Daniells exhibited paintings of India and published Oriental Scenery, a series of aquatints based on their sketches.
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Artist of the Month - October 2008
Philip Reinagle RA (1749-1833)
The Reinagles were a family of artists and musicians of Hungarian origin. Philip was the eldest child of Joseph and Annie Reinagle and was probably born in Edinburgh where his parents settled after moving to the U.K. At the age of fourteen he was sent to London to become an assistant to the Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay and he later studied at the newly-founded Royal Academy Schools.
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Artist of the Month - November 2008
William Dyce RA (1806-1864)
The son of an Aberdeen doctor and lecturer, William Dyce initially followed in his father's footsteps by studying medicine but soon turned his attention to theology and painting. This thorough academic grounding in both science and the humanities had a profound effect on Dyce's later career, distinguishing him as one of the most scholarly artists of his generation.
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Artist of the Month - December 2008
Peter Freeth RA (b. 1938)
Peter Freeth was born in Birmingham in 1938. He studied etching with Anthony Gross at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, from 1956 to 1960. In 1960 he won the Prix de Rome in Engraving and spent the next three years based in Rome and travelling throughout Italy. Following his return to England he became a tutor in etching at the Royal Academy Schools in 1966, a post he held until 2007.
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Artist of the Month - January 2009
Edward Bird RA (1772-1819)
Born in Wolverhampton in 1772 to a carpenter and his large family, Bird made a humble entrance into the art world. At age 13 he apprenticed in "japanning" at a local firm, painting tea trays with black varnish to simulate Oriental lacquer. He developed an artistic hand by copying engravings, but had virtually no formal training. During his apprenticeship, Bird sold paintings, earning enough to prompt his move to Bristol and become an independent artist.
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Artist of the Month - February 2009
Briton Rivière RA (1840-1920)
Briton Rivière came from a family of painters, and before his family moved out of London in 1851, the young Rivière used to draw animals in London zoo. Although Rivière was seen as a successor to Edwin Landseer RA, he did not usually give his animals quasi-human characteristics, but many of his pictures show great sympathy between man and beast and were immensely popular with the Victorian public.
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Artist of the Month - March 2009
Sir William Beechey RA (1753-1839)
William Beechey entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1774 and his early work included panels for coaches and portraits and small full-lengths. He worked in Norwich and possibly Yarmouth for some time before settling in London in 1787 where he soon built up a thriving portrait practice.
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Artist of the Month - April 2009
Henry Tresham RA (ca.1750-1814)
Tresham's interest in Roman themes is unsurprising as he lived in city for thirteen years. Born in Ireland, he first studied at the Dublin Society's drawing school but determined to become a history painter rather than a portraitist, Tresham travelled to Italy in 1775.
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Artist of the Month - May 2009
William Powell Frith RA (1819-1909)
William Powell Frith was an immensely successful and popular Victorian artist, best known for his vivid portrayal of contemporary life, from the hustle and bustle of crowds on Derby Day or the fuss and flurry of passengers boarding a train at Paddington Station to sympathetic portraits of household servants and of close friends.
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Artist of the Month - June 2009
Dominic Serres RA (1722-1793)
Serres was the only marine painter to be included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy. He was born in Gascony, France, and despite his parents' wishes for him to join the church, he ran away on to a ship bound for South America. He ended up in Havana, Cuba, where he was taken prisoner by a British frigate and was brought to England in the 1750s.
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Artist of the Month - July 2009
Alfred Elmore RA (1815-1881)
Elmore was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1857 and choose to present as his Diploma work a scene from one of Shakespeare's comedies. The mid-19th century saw an increased fascination with Shakespearean subjects.
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Artist of the Month - August 2009
Robert Austin RA (1895-1973)
Robert Austin was born in Leicester in 1895 and attended the Municipal School of Art there before going on to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 1914. Army service during the First World War interrupted his studies, but in 1919 he resumed them under Sir Frank Short RA (1857-1945), the RCA's great teacher of printmaking who no doubt was the first to set Austin the challenge of taking up the engraver's tools.
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Artist of the Month - September 2009
Sir Thomas Brock RA (1847-1922)
Sir Thomas Brock's most important commission was the Imperial Memorial to Queen Victoria on the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace. The statue was unveiled in 1911 and George V was so impressed that he knighted Brock on the spot.
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Artist of the Month - October 2009
Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA (1769-1830)
Thomas Lawrence was one of the finest and most successful portrait painters of his age. He painted with great fluency and this, combined with his inventiveness in composing his portraits, ensured that his influence on future generations of artists was evident well into the 20th century.
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Artist of the Month - November 2009
Sir Roger de Grey PRA (1918-1995)
De Grey was a nephew of one of the Camden Town Group of painters, Spencer Gore. Although figures are important in his early work, it was landscape that became de Grey's favourite subject, particularly the landscapes around his home in Kent, and also the south-west of France.
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Artist of the Month - December 2009
J.M.W. Turner RA (1775-1851)
Perhaps the most celebrated of all British artists, J. M. W. Turner dominated landscape painting in this country for the first half of the 19th century and beyond.
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Artist of the Month - January 2010
Robert Buhler RA (1916-1989)
Green Park is one of a series of cityscapes, which Buhler painted in the 1940s. This wintry view of the Green Park is painted with Buhler's typically muted colouring and soft tonality broken only by the flash of a bold red double-decker bus.
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Artist of the Month - February 2010
William Hamilton RA (1751-1801)
Vertumnus and Pomona is a depiction of a tale known mainly from Ovid's Metamorphoses. This work represents a shift in Hamilton's work from portraiture to subject pictures.
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Artist of the Month - March 2010
Michael 'Angelo' Rooker ARA (1746 - 1801)
Rooker is said to have depicted architecture 'as if he loved every brick and stone and was aware of life behind every window'
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Artist of the Month - April 2010
Sir Edwin Landseer RA (1802-1873)
Landseer made his reputation through depictions of dogs and deer, which he often invested with human characteristics. Queen Victoria was a keen admirer and commissioned him to paint many portraits of the Royal family and their pets.
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Artist of the Month - May 2010
William Mulready RA (1786-1863)
William Mulready was born in Co. Clare, Ireland but spent most of his life in the Bayswater area of London. A gifted artist from an early age he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1800.
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Artist of the Month - June 2010
David Roberts RA (1796-1864)
David Roberts was the first independent British artist to travel and paint extensively in the Near East. His evocative portrayals of ancient monuments and vast desert landscapes brought the topography of Egypt and the 'lands of the Bible' to an appreciative European audience.
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Artist of the Month - July 2010
Julian Trevelyan RA (1910-1988)
While studying English at Cambridge Trevelyan became acquainted with Surrealist ideas and was fascinated by the human sub-conscious. Over the next 50 years Trevelyan would generate countless imaginative works, but the printmaking medium would dominate.
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Artist of the Month - August 2010
Chris Orr RA (b.1943)
Throughout his career Chris Orr has worked in various media, producing countless drawings, paintings and printed works. Early in his twenties, Orr became fascinated with the practice of printmaking because of its experimental qualities, multiple nature and strong connection to books.
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Artist of the Month - September 2010
John Flaxman RA (1755-1826)
Flaxman was recognised as one of the leading sculptors of his day but it was his talent as a draughtsman that won him international acclaim. While living in Rome in the early 1790s he produced dynamic yet understated outline illustrations of the works of Dante, Homer and Aeschylus which were an immediate success and were published as engravings throughout Europe.
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![<b>[1]</b> <i>Bust of Teucer</i>, bronze, after 1882 <br>© Royal Academy of Arts, London](http://www.racollection.org.uk/asset_arena/image/27/PL003427.jpg)
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Artist of the Month - October 2010
Sir Hamo Thornycroft RA (1850-1925)
Thornycroft was an early exponent of the New Sculpture movement, which championed a more naturalistic and detailed approach to modelling.
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Artist of the Month - November 2010
Eadweard Muybridge 1830-1904
Muybridge began his photographic studies of animals in motion through a commission from the Governor of California, Leland Stanford, who wanted to study the gait of his horses with the aim of improving their racing performance.
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Artist of the Month - December 2010
Sir Hubert von Herkomer RA (1849-1914)
Herkomer's earlier work exploring some of the harsher aspects of contemporary life was revisited in the work given to the Royal Academy on his election as an Academician in 1890. On Strike is painted on a huge scale and succeeds in engendering sympathy for the families of striking workers.
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Artist of the Month - January 2011
John Bacon RA (1740-1799)
Bacon's Diploma Work, given to the Royal Academy on his election to full Membership, was Sickness which is a copy of the head of figure which forms part of the monument to Thomas Guy in Guy's Hospital Chapel, London (1779).
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Artist of the Month - February 2011
Sir George Frampton RA (1860-1928)
Frampton's bust of The Marchioness of Granby depicts Violet Lindsay, later Marchioness of Granby, a practicing artist and member of an aristocratic circle of aesthetes known as 'The Souls'. In her later years she continued to live by aesthetic codes, wearing unconventional flowing garments in muted colours pinned with exotic brooches, as seen in Frampton's bust.
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Artist of the Month - March 2011
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema RA (1836-1912)
Alma-Tadema's trip to Pompeii in 1863 inspired a fascination with classicism that defined the rest of his career and influenced his approach to the interior design of his home.
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Artist of the Month - April 2011
Ivor Abrahams RA (b.1935)
The Masque of the Red Death is typical of Abrahams' approach to Edgar Allan Poe. Rather than depict the climatic scene, when at the stroke of midnight the figure of the Red Death wreaks slaughter amongst the revellers, the artist presents instead an incriminating object found after the event.
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Artist of the Month - May 2011
John Gibson RA (1790-1866)
John Gibson moved to Rome in 1817 and developed an affinity with the art, architecture and atmosphere of the city. Gibson was guided and supported by Antonio Canova and he wholeheartedly adopted his mentor's neo-classical ideals, refusing to sculpt subjects in contemporary costume.
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Artist of the Month - June 2011
Sir David Wilkie R.A. (1785-1841)
Wilkie excelled in this kind of low-life subject, which was immensely popular with the public. He was particularly skillful in choosing scenes which were not only entertaining but also, through expressive gestures and carefully posed figures, involved the viewer in a narrative.
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Artist of the Month - July 2011
William Etty RA (1787-1849)
William Etty was the first major British artist to specialise in painting nudes. A quiet, conservative bachelor who claimed that his only vice was drinking too much tea, Etty was an unlikely pioneer for this controversial genre.
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Artist of the Month - August 2011
Angelica Kauffman RA (1741-1807)
All her life, she enjoyed international patronage such as the family of George III in Britain, Prince Nikolay Yusupov in Russia and Emperor Joseph II of Austria among others. She died in Rome where her funeral was arranged by the Neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822).
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Artist of the Month - September 2011
Richard Eurich, RA (1903-1992)
Eurich moved in 1934 to Dibden Purlieu, Hampshire, where the nearby Solent and Southampton docks became an important source of inspiration. Eurich's love of and talent for painting coastal scenes was recognised in the early 1940s, when he was appointed an Official War Artist to the Admiralty.
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Artist of the Month - October 2011
John Constable, RA (1776-1837)
In 1819 Constable embarked upon a series of large six-foot canvases with the aim of making his reputation as a serious landscape painter. The Leaping Horse is from this series and depicts a tow horse jumping one of the barriers erected along the path by the River Stour to prevent cattle from straying.
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Artist of the Month - November 2011
Alfred Parsons,RA (1847-1920)
Parsons was not only a successful landscape painter but also an illustrator and garden designer who served as a judge at the Chelsea Flower Show. Born in Somerset in 1847, Parsons was a Post Office clerk for two years before he left to study art at the age of 20.
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Artist of the Month - December 2011
F. Ernest Jackson, ARA (1872-1945)
The draughtsman, lithographer and painter, F. Ernest Jackson, is little known today. But this suited him well in his lifetime, as he humorously told a friend, 'I want to live in obscurity. Remember, you can't do things and get the credit for them. Getting the credit is a wholetime job.'
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Artist of the Month - January 2012
Weight was influenced by artists such as Edward Munch and James Ensor. In The Silence from 1965, Weight paints three figures in his Battersea garden observing the two minutes silence on Remembrance Sunday.
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Artist of the Month - February 2012
Olwyn Bowey, RA (b. 1936)
Olwyn Bowey, who celebrates her seventy-sixth birthday this month, is primarily known for her intimate depictions of greenhouses and plant life.
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Artist of the Month - March 2012
John Singer Sargent RA (1856-1925)
Sargent was well travelled and was equally at home in Italy, France, England or the United States. His friend, the American novelist Henry James, once remarked that the painter had 'high talent, a charming nature, artistic and personal, and is civilized to his finger-tips'.
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Artist of the Month - April 2012
Edward Stott ARA (1859-1918)
Described in 1908 as 'the poet-painter of the twilight', the painter and draughtsman Edward Stott was well known in his time for his atmospheric depictions of rural and biblical scenes imbued with an ethereal quality.
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Artist of the Month - May 2012
Charles West Cope RA (1811 - 1890)
This magnificent group portrait by Charles West Cope shows a group of Royal Academicians selecting paintings for the Summer Exhibition of 1875.
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Artist of the Month - June 2012
Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (1723-1792)
Joshua Reynolds was unanimously elected the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts when it was founded in 1768. At the time, he was widely regarded as the most successful painter in Britain and, as such, was the obvious choice to lead the newly formed Academy. However, Reynolds was not a favourite of George III, the Academy's royal patron and founder.
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Artist of the Month - July 2012
Carlini's marble bust depicts King George III in Classical dress. It was displayed on the mantelpiece in the Library in the Academy's rooms in Somerset House. This was an appropriate setting, as the King was a renowned bibliophile and had donated several books to the Academy's library
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Artist of the Month - August 2012
Anne Desmet describes her work as pulling in two directions: 'one body of work is essentially topographical, but often subject to metamorphoses; the other is concerned with intuitive architectural fantasies, urban myths and histories of urban destruction and regeneration'.
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Artist of the Month - September 2012
The painter and designer G.B. Cipriani was born in Florence, Italy, but spent most of his life in London. Throughout his career, Cipriani maintained a close working relationship with the influential archtect Sir William Chambers, producing elegant neo-classical designs for both the interior and exterior decoration of his buildings
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Artist of the Month - October 2012
When Henry H.H. Cameron was eight, the family moved to Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. It was here that his mother, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, developed a much closer and more intense association with the Tennyson family, who lived a short distance away.
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Artist of the Month - November 2012
Banks presented The Falling Titan to the Royal Academy in 1786. It depicts the failed attempt of an earthbound giant to reach Olympus and overthrow Jupiter by piling up great boulders. Dramatic foreshortening heightens the dynamism of the tumbling titan.
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Artist of the Month - December 2012
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (1775-1851) is one of the most celebrated of all British artists. Engaging with both the art of the Old Masters and contemporary aesthetic theory, Turner profoundly altered the perception of landscape painting among his contemporaries and for future generations. His extraordinary artistic output emphatically demonstrated the power of this genre to embody poetic, emotive and historical themes.
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Artist of the Month - January 2013
Thomas Gainsborough initially found success as a painter of portraits, and his Self-portrait demonstrates his ability in this genre. With a seemingly effortless technique of expressive and sketchily applied brushwork, Gainsborough captures a fleeting expression as he turns and gazes quizzically at the viewer.
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Artist of the Month - February 2013
Constable was a dedicated to painting nature. He made hundreds of sketches direct from nature and imbued his studio paintings with a feeling of open-air spontaneity.
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![] Sydney Lee RA, <i>The Red Tower</i>, 1928. Oil on canvas. <br>© Royal Academy of Arts, London](http://www.racollection.org.uk/asset_arena/image/45/PL009545.jpg)
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Artist of the Month - March 2013
For four decades, Lee travelled throughout Britain and Europe in search of subjects. He became highly regarded for his prints as well as his paintings, working in a wide variety of media including woodcut, wood engraving, etching and aquatint.
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Artist of the Month - April 2013
Waterlow's painting portrays a tranquil scene on the River Loing, a branch of the Seine that flows south of Paris near the Forest of Fontainebleau.
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