John Linnell

The precocious son of a Bloomsbury frame maker, John Linnell entered the Royal Academy schools in 1805 at the same time that he began studying with influential watercolor painter and drawing master John Varley (1778-1842). Under Varley's tutelage, but primarily in the company of fellow student William Mulready (1786-1863), Linnell mastered plein-air landscape painting. His studies at the Kensington gravel pits (ca. 1812) and other locales in and around London are remarkable for the intensity and novelty of their naturalistic observation. From 1807 Linnell was a regular contributor of landscape and portrait paintings at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Society of Painters in Watercolours. His conversion to the Baptist faith in 1811 intensified his conviction that meticulous landscape realism was a moral act pursued as a duty to God's creation. Primarily for financial reasons, Linnell painted his first miniature portrait in 1816, after which portraiture in all media tended to dominate his professional production for several decades. In 1818 he befriended William Blake (1757-1827), virtually supporting that irascible genius during his last years with important commissions, including The Book of Job engravings and the 102 watercolor illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy. Linnell's commitment to landscape painting as a spiritual art profoundly influenced the visionary early work of his pupil and future son-in-law, Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). In the 1840s, but especially after 1851, when he moved his family to Redhill in Surrey, Linnell resumed landscape painting. Many of his later pictures had literal or implied religious subject matter, and although they were not always successful commercially, they established Linnell as one of the masters of the pastoral landscape tradition in the nineteenth century.

Text © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2024