Page:Dictionary of Artists of the English School (1878).djvu/15

 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. field of tracing the origin and duties of all the Government officers. This he completed in 1851; it was entitled 'The Official Handbook of Church and State,' published by Mr. Murray. It was greatly appreciated, and a second edition called for and exhausted; nevertheless, it was wholly unremunerative to its author. These severe and sedentary labours, however, told upon his constitution, and after an attack of congestion of the brain, added to heavy domestic troubles, he was advised to ask leave in 1860 to retire from the office he had held above forty years.

The object of this short memoir, however, is to relate Mr. Redgrave's connexion with art and artists, and his qualifications fof the work to which this memoir is appended. We have seen his acquaintanceship with artists by his early studies; and when, in 1842, his brother Richard, who had acted as Secretary to the Etching Club from its foundation in 1837, was obliged, from his own accumulated labours, to resign the office, Samuel succeeded him, and continued to fulfil the duties until the day of his death, this duty bringing him in constant connexion with many of the most rising artists of the day. In the International Exhibition of 1862, Mr. R. Redgrave was entrusted with getting together an historical series of the works of British painters, both in oil and water-colours. He sought the aid of his brother, who undertook the arrangement of the pictures in water-colours. Both were greatly interested in the work, and having accumulated much material as to the history of English art, they determined to embody it in a book which should serve as a continuation to Vertue and Walpole, and they jointly compiled 'A Century of Painters of the British School,' carrying on the history of art to the date of its publication in 1866. In 1867 to Mr. Redgrave was entrusted the due representation of British Art in the Paris International Exhibition, which he carried out successfully. He was for many years an active member of the Council of the Society of Arts, and became one of their Vice-Presidents. The Society appointed him their Trustee (under Sir John Soane's will) of the Soane Museum, a trust which he continued to hold until his death.

Besides these multifarious labours, he submitted, in 1865, to the Lord President of the Committee of Council on Education a proposal to form a Loan Collection of Miniature Portraits, which was

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