Clarkson Stanfield

Clarkson Stanfield (portrait by John Simpson , ca.1829)

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield , RA (often mistakenly William Clarkson Stanfield ) (born December 3, 1793 in Sunderland , † May 18, 1867 in Hampstead ) was a famous English stage and artist painter during his lifetime. The first name 'Clarkson' was chosen by his father James Field Stanfield , an Irish-born seaman, author, actor and campaigner against the slave trade, after Thomas Clarkson , the founder of the abolitionist movement , whom he personally knew and admired .

Life

Stanfield entered the British Merchant Navy at a young age . In 1808 he entered service in the Royal Navy , where he was mainly promoted by Captain Marryat , who valued his hard work and character, but also admired his artistic talent. In 1814, however, he retired from the Navy due to an injury he sustained when he fell from a mast. Queen Victoria called this fall later with the phrase "What a lucky tumble!" . In 1815 he undertook a trip to China on the East Indiaman Warley , from which he returned with numerous sketches, which he referred to several times in his later career. Finally, he decided to try his luck as a stage and panorama painter and in August 1816 got his first job at the Old Royalty Theater (Wellclose Square) in London , which was so successful that he soon moved to the newly opened Royal Coburg Theater moved to Lambeth , where he met David Roberts , with whom he eventually became a lifelong friend. Both complemented each other through their different detailed knowledge of seafaring (Stanfield) and architecture (Roberts). Stanfield began to paint easel pictures at an early age and participated in exhibitions from around 1820. In 1823 he was a co-founder of the Royal Society of British Artists and in 1829 became president of this society. In 1832 and 1835, far too late from the point of view of art criticism, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a Royal Academician .

Stanfield was married twice: first marriage to Mary Hutchinson (* around 1799, † November 27, 1821; marriage on July 20, 1818 in St. Dunstan's, Stepney). From this first marriage 2 children were born: Clarkson William Stanfield (* July 25, 1819 - January 24, 1853) and Mary Elizabeth Stanfield (* October 31, 1821).

His second wife was Rebecca Adcock (March 17, 1808, † June 12, 1875), whom he married on October 15, 1825 in Southwark. They had 10 children, including (as the second eldest) George Clarkson Stanfield , who inherited his father's artistic talent and who also became famous as a (marine) painter and draftsman. However, he never succeeded in stepping out of the oversized shadow of his father.

Stanfield was one of the closest friends of Charles Dickens , for whom he drew numerous illustrations for some of his smaller books. In 1857 Dickens dedicated his book Little Dorrit to Stanfield. After Stanfield's death Dickens wrote about him: " He was the soul of frankness, generosity and simplicity. The most genial, the most affectionate, the most loving and the most lovable of men. Success had never for an instant spoiled him... He had been a sailor once; and all the best characteristics that are popularly attributed to sailors, being his, and being in him refined by the influence of his Art, formed a whole not likely to be often seen. He was born on May 27, 1867 buried in the Kensal Green RC cemetery.

plant

Clarkson Stanfield was considered by contemporary critics, along with William Turner , to be one of the best marine and landscape painters in England. After leaving the Navy due to illness, he first turned to stage painting and finally reached his first artistic climax in this profession from 1823 at the Drury Lane Theater in London, where, according to contemporary criticism, he even surpassed the painter de Loutherbourg , who earlier had worked at Drury Lane and had earned the stage painting a high reputation. Stanfield perfected his work and finally became known not only for the well-known seascapes but also for detailed dioramas : "There he did more than any painter of his generation in advancing the taste of the public for landscape art." Around 1834 Stanfield stopped painting on the stage , however occasionally and at the request of his close friends, such as William Macready, Charles Dickens or Benjamin Nottingham Webster , occasionally helped out for the Adelphi Theater, which he founded , in order to paint individual scenes for plays. Received wide attention u. a. his extensive (movable) set for the June 10, 1838 performance of Shakespeare's Henry V by his friend, director and actor at the Drury Lane Theater, William Charles Macready .

After his departure from the theater, Stanfield painted both oil paintings and watercolors , mainly seascapes as well as coastal and river landscapes. In 1827 he exhibited his first large oil painting "Wreckers off Fort Rouge" at the British Institution .

During his frequent travels to Italy, France, Germany and Holland, many Venetian scenes were created in the 1830s and mostly Dutch scenes in the 1840s. Many of these works appeared as lithographs and steel engravings in the travel literature of the time, especially in Traveling sketches in the north of Italy, the Tyrol and on the Rhine (1832), Traveling Sketches on the Rhine, and in Belgium and Holland (1833), Traveling sketches on the sea-coasts of France (1834) and the Sketches on the Moselle, the Rhine and the Meuse (1838).

The Battle of Trafalgar (1836)

In 1831 he was commissioned to portray the opening of the New London Bridge and Portsmouth harbor by King William IV . Probably his best work, however, was the painting Battle of Trafalgar (1836), which he made for the United Services Club in London in Pall Mall , where it still hangs today. Other significant works include: The Castle of Ischia (1841), The Day After the Wreck (1844), On the Dogger Bank (1846), The Battle of Roveredo (1851), Victory towed into Gibraltar (1853), and The abandoned ( 1856). Some of his oil paintings with scenes from his travels to the Moselle, u. a. in the summer of 1829 (he traveled with a “travel boat”) can also be seen in public collections in Germany; for example in Bonn, Trier and Koblenz. One picture shows the painter at work sitting in his boat against the backdrop of the Moselle town of Klotten and served as the cover picture for the Sketches on the Moselle, the Rhine and the Meuse (1838). He traveled to Italy several times and by chance he became an eyewitness to the eruption of Vesuvius in 1839 . The sight made a great impression on him, so that it was finally immortalized in a larger oil painting.

In 1870, three years after Stanfield's death, he was honored with a major retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. In its overwhelming criticism, the Times wrote at the time: “ There are no English painters whose works have won against and warmer popularity outside the artistic pale. Stanfield's practiced command of the artist of composition, his unring sense of the agreeable and picturesque in subject and effect, his pleasant and cheerful color and last, not least, the large use to which he turned his knowledge and love of the sea and shipping ... (all) added to the widespread admiration he had won by his consummately skillful scene painting, (and) combined to make him one of the most popular, if not the most popular, of landscape painters. "

literature

• The spectacular career of Clarkson Stanfield - seaman, scene-painter, royal academician: [catalog of an exhibition held at] Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, Pieter van der Merve, 1979 - 184 pages
• Dictionary of National Biography on the multimedia CD Infopedia UK, Softkey Multimedia Inc., 1996.
• Entry: Stanfield, Clarkson . In: The Dictionary of Victorian Painters ; Dictionary of British Art, Volume IV. Christopher Wood Ltd., 1971, ISBN 0-902028-72-3 , p. 446.

Web links

Commons : William Clarkson Stanfield  - Album with Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Works by Clarkson Stanfield at Zeno.org .
• Sketches on the Moselle, the Rhine and the Meuse at dilibri.de
• BBC online gallery of works of art in UK museums

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 'Remembering Slavery' Online Exhibition at the Tyne & Wear Museum, Newcastle Upon Tyne ( Memento of the original from February 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ see “The Illustrated London News” of June 1, 1867, pp. 544ff
3. ↑ Article from the Spectator on the award of medals of honor
4. ↑ from: "The Story of a Great Friendship: Charles Dickens and Clarkson Stanfield" - Clark, Cumberland (Editor); Chiswick Press, London 1918
5. ^ Rideau-info