Hubert von Herkomer

Sir Hubert von Herkomer was a Bavarian-born British painter, pioneering film-director, and composer. Though a very successful portrait artist, especially of men, he is mainly remembered for his earlier works that took a realistic approach to the conditions of life of the poor. Hard Times (1885; Manchester Art Gallery) showing the distraught family of a travelling day-labourer at the side of a road, is one of his best-known works.

In 1869 Herkomer exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts and sold his first picture for two guineas. Also in 1869, he began working as an illustrator for the newly founded newspaper The Graphic, a rival of the Illustrated London News.

On 10 January 1872, Herkomer was naturalized as a British subject. Then aged 22 and living at 32, Smith Street, Chelsea, he was described as an unmarried artist. His oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria was witnessed by Sir Sills John Gibbons, Lord Mayor of London.

In 1873, Herkomer visited a friend who lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and the next year he rented a pair of cottages there called Dyreham and a studio near Melbourne Road, Bushey. By the time he was twenty-four, he had sold a painting for five hundred pounds. It was by his oil painting The Last Muster (1875), after a wood-engraving of 1871, that he established his position as an artist of high distinction at the Royal Academy. Another early notable work is his Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster Union (1878). In 1879 he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy.

In 1884, a full-page caricature of Herkomer by FG (his friend Franz Goedecker) appeared in Vanity Fair, captioned "Painter, Sculptor, Blacksmith &c". In the same year, he established an Art School at Bushey which he continued until 1904, attracting many students. In 1885 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, a position he held until 1894. He was the first president of the Oxford Art Society, established in 1891.

In 1890 Herkomer was elected a Royal Academician, in 1893 an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society, and the next year a full member.

At Bushey, Herkomer built a large house, Lululaund, named after Lulu Griffith, the second of his three wives, in a heavily German style, designed about 1886 by the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, for whom he painted a portrait. This house was completed in 1894 and thereafter served as studio and school. It contained a theatre, where Herkomer put on productions of his own plays and musical compositions and also made films.

In 1899, King Otto of Bavaria ennobled Herkomer as "Ritter von Herkomer" and as a Knight of the Merit Order of the Bavarian Crown. The same year, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite award for the arts by the Emperor of Germany.

On her deathbed, in 1901, Queen Victoria was initially photographed in study and eventually painted by Herkomer as an alternative to the more traditional mask produced in wax, which her son, the new king Edward VII, decried. The painting, showing the Queen lying half-length among lilies and other flowers, swathed in white tulle, her right hand holding a cross, is part of the Royal Collection held at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where it hangs in the Pavilion Principal Stairs Vestibule. In 1907, Herkomer was knighted by King Edward VII.

Herkomer exhibited a large number of memorable portraits, figure subjects, and landscapes, both in oil and watercolour; he achieved marked success as a worker in enamel, as an etcher, a mezzotint engraver, and an illustrative draughtsman and he exercised wide influence upon art education by means of the Herkomer School (Incorporated) at Bushey, which he founded in 1883 and directed without payment until 1904, when he retired. It was voluntarily wound up in 1926 having been run up to that time by his former pupil, Lucy Kemp-Welch. It is now defunct.

Despite being a prominent member of Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Watercolour Society, and Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, as well as being on familiar terms with the royal family, Herkomer was never totally accepted by the British establishment, as he was ultimately a victim of the deteriorating relationship between Great Britain and Germany, which he shuttled between, spending most of his summers in Bavaria.

Four of his pictures, Found (1885), Sir Henry Tate (1897), Portrait of Lady Tate (1899) and The Council of the Royal Academy (1908), are in the national collection at the Tate Gallery. In 1907, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and a knighthood was conferred upon him by the king. He was already a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.

Herkomer was also a pioneering filmmaker. He established a studio at Lululaund and directed some seven historical costume dramas designed to be shown accompanied by his own music. None of them is known to have survived.

Herkomer had strong connections with Wales. His second and third wives hailed from Ruthin, and he spent long periods in Snowdonia painting with his friend, Charles Mansel Lewis from Stradey Castle, Llanelli. In 1899, Herkomer designed the Grand Sword of the Gorsedd of Bards, and he also designed some of its other regalia. Of Herkomer's work for the Gorsedd, Jan Morris has noted that he "created for its functionaries gloriously neo-Druidical robes and insignia of gold, velvet, and ermine (the Archdruid's breastplate was designed to choke him, Herkomer said, if he gave a false judgement)."

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024