Thomas Armstrong (painter)

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Thomas Armstrong , CB (born October 19, 1832 in Manchester - Fallowfield , † April 24, 1911 in Abbots Langley , Hertfordshire ), was an English history , genre and landscape painter and director of the South Kensington Museum from 1881 to 1898 .

Life

Woman with Lilies , 1876

Armstrong, eldest son of businessman Thomas Armstrong and his wife Sarah, née Evans, received a private school education in Tarvin near Chester . At the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts he studied with the portrait painter Robert Crozier (1815-1891). After he had definitely decided against the wishes of his parents to become a painter, he went to Paris in 1853 , where he attended the Académie Suisse in the evening and Ary Scheffer's studio during the day . In the summer he stayed with Jean-François Millet , Karl Bodmer and Charles Emile Jacque in the Barbizon artists' colony . In Paris Armstrong got to know the trio of artists George du Maurier , Edward Poynter and James McNeill Whistler , which Du Maurier later processed in his novel Trilby . In 1855/1856 Armstrong studied for a few months at the Antwerp Art Academy under Theodor van Lerius (1819–1880), then he returned to Paris. In 1858/1859 he stayed in Algiers with his uncle, the priest William Evans . In 1859/1860 he lived in Düsseldorf , then known for the Düsseldorf School of Painting . There, Du Maurier visited him for a while, who visited an ophthalmologist in Düsseldorf because of an eye disease he had suffered in Antwerp.

Then Armstrong returned to England. At first he worked there as a decorative painter and designed houses, occasionally together with his friend Randolph Caldecott . In 1864 he settled in London , where he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1865 and 1877 . Until 1881 he was then represented in the Grosvenor Gallery . In 1872 he toured the Riviera of the Ligurian Sea . Armstrong's circle of friends in London included Du Maurier and Poynter as well as the painters Thomas Reynolds Lamont (1826–1898) and George Howard (1843–1911), the 9th Earl of Carlisle .

As Poynter's successor, Armstrong became director of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1881. An art school was attached to this museum, and Armstrong influenced its teaching, curriculum and faculty, in particular through the appointment of teachers. On April 22, 1881, he married Mary Alice, daughter of Colonel Brine of Sheldon, Devon. The couple had their only child, Ambrose George, in 1883, who died early. After Armstrong had retired from the museum management in 1898, he took up painting again.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 426.
personal data
SURNAME Armstrong, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English history, genre and landscape painter and director of the South Kensington Museum (1881–1898)
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1832
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester - Fallowfield
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1911
Place of death Abbots Langley , Hertfordshire