John Everett

While Everett was born Herbert Barnard Everett, he chose to be called John from 1901. Everett specialised in marine paintings. A graduate of Slade School of Fine Art and Académie Julian in Paris, Everett embarked on a series of 16 sea voyages. He signed on in the London docks, as a working member of the crew of the sailing ship, Iquique, in 1898, travelling to Sydney and returning in 1899. Back in London in 1899, Everett returned to the Slade, working and socializing with his fellow students who formed part of London's cafe society. They all went on painting excursions to Cornwall and France, and these trips had a profound effect on their work. In 1901 he married his Irish cousin and fellow Slade student, Katherine Herbert, 1872-1951.

His works, mostly landscapes of his native Dorset and maritime paintings, became known after the rediscovery of a set of plates that he made of Dorset based on fictional places in the works of the writer Thomas Hardy. The plates were meant to be published in a book by American writer Ernest Brennecke, but the book was banned in Britain through intervention by Hardy himself, who felt it was too inaccurate.

Text © Royal Museums Greenwich, 2021