Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/336

Rh have given lessons to his daughter, afterwards Mrs. Shelley. He painted the Duke of Argyll in 1817, and in 1819 a miniature of his wife on ivory, which so pleased the Marchioness of Stafford that she engaged him to paint her daughter, Lady Belgrave, in the same style. Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, Lord Belgrave, Lord Shelborne, Viscount and Viscountess Ebrington, Lady Frederica Stanhope, the Princess Sophia Matilda, and many others also sat for miniatures. His charge for portraits about 1817 was from three to twelve guineas a head. The most important of his landscapes during this period was the ‘St. John Preaching’ of 1818, in which he displayed great poetical feeling in the union of the landscape with the sentiment of the subject. His first contribution to the Royal Academy (1813), called ‘Bird Catching,’ afterwards known as ‘Kensington in 1814,’ was also notable. In 1814–15 his landscapes were from Wales and Derbyshire, the latter being the result of a tour in North Wales with Mr. G. R. Lewis in 1812 or 1813, and another tour in Derbyshire in 1814, taken in view of illustrations to Walton's ‘Angler.’ Athletic and robust, he boxed, rowed, and swam well, and performed a great part of his journeys on foot.

He married his first wife in 1817, and removed from his father's house to 35 Rathbone Place, and thence at the end of 1818 to 6 Cirencester Place. In 1824 he removed his family to Hampstead, keeping his studio in Cirencester Place.

His plan of life appears to have been to go on making money by portrait-painting until he had laid by sufficient to enable him to devote the rest of his life to landscape. This plan he accomplished, but, judging from the catalogues of the Royal Academy, not till 1847, when he was fifty-five years old. Between 1821 and that year he exhibited over one hundred portraits, including drawings and miniatures, and some ten or twelve landscapes. Among the former were ‘Lady Torrens and Family’ (1821), the Earl of Denbigh (1823), Lady Lyndhurst (1830), A. W. Callcott, R.A. (1832), W. Mulready, R.A., and the Rev. T. R. Malthus (1833), T. Phillips, R.A., and the Marquis of Bristol (1835), Sir Robert Peel and the Archbishop of Dublin (1838), the Marquis of Lansdowne (1840), the Bishop of Chichester (1841), Sir Thomas, Lady, and the Right Hon. Francis Baring (1842), and Thomas Carlyle (1844). Among the other pictures of this period were ‘Christ's Appearance to the two Disciples journeying to Emmaus’ (1835), ‘Philip baptising the Eunuch’ (1840), and ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1843).

In 1847 the character of his contributions changed suddenly. Henceforth no more portraits. In that year he sent three landscapes, ‘The Mill,’ ‘Midday,’ and ‘The Morning Walk;’ in the next one a large composition (59 by 88 inches), ‘The Eve of the Deluge’ (which was purchased by Mr. Gillott for 1,000l.), and in the next ‘Sandpits’ and ‘The Return of Ulysses.’ To the close of his life he seldom, if ever, failed to send some fine work to the Academy, but not often more than two. The rich scenery of Surrey generally supplied him with his subjects. Its harvest fields and woodlands, its hills and copses, its glowing sunsets and stormy cloudracks engaged his pencil over and over again. With these splendid records of natural beauty he was generally content, but now and then he conceived with equal force some imaginary scene as the fitting stage of a great event, generally in Bible history. In 1850 appeared ‘Christ and the Woman of Samaria at Jacob's Well,’ and in 1854 ‘The Disobedient Prophet.’ In these works the fine composition and colour and appropriate sentiment of the landscape were united to admirable grouping and expressive action of the figures.

Notwithstanding, however, the high merit of his work, he remained to the end of his days without academical honours. In 1821 he had put down his name as a candidate for associateship, and in 1842 he withdrew it in disgust. Late in life the Academy offered him membership, but he declined it. His reasons for doing so, and his view of the Academy in the light of a national institution, may be read in the ‘Athenæum’ (1867, p. 759), and in his pamphlet, ‘The Royal Academy a National Institution.’

In 1829 he removed from Hampstead to a house which he had built in Porchester Terrace (No. 38), Bayswater, and in 1852 to Redstone Wood, Redhill, Surrey, where he had built another house on his own property. Here he lived till his death, enjoying the practice of his art, surrounded by his friends and family. Several of the latter were distinguished as artists. In 1858 he is styled for the first time J. Linnell, senior, in the catalogue, where the names of three sons, James Thomas Linnell, William Linnell, and John Linnell, junior, appear together for the first time. His daughter married Samuel Palmer [q. v.], the water-colour painter, whose artistic aims were in sympathy with his own.

His last contribution was a picture of ‘Woodcutters,’ sent the year before his death, which took place at Redhill on 20 Jan. 1882. He left behind him a considerable