OBITUARY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIV, Issue 10292, 3 November 1909, Page 4

OBITUARY.

[By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.] (Pep. Press Association.; Received November 3, at 8.35 a.m. London, November 2. Obituary.—W. P. Frith, Royal Academician. [Frith (William Powell), retired R.A., was born at Studley, near Ripon, in 1819, and at sixteen entered Sass' Academy. At nineteen he painted, among other pictures, a very hue portrait of himself. His first picture was sent to the British Gallery, then called the British Institution, m Pall Mall. The subject was 'A Page with a Letter." A year or so later this society rejected a picture of his called "Rebecca" —the solitary rejection of a long career. After having mastered his craft, he took one or more portraitpainting tours in the English provinces, and they proved far from unremuiierative. In 1840 he sent_ his first picture to the Academy—"Malvolio cross-gar-tered before Countess Olivio." The next season he was hung "on the line," and has never been off it during fifty subsequent years. Just at this time Maclise, the bold draughtsman and poor colorist, whose very material and solid conceptions of poetic phantasies were at one time held by a clique to be the lie plus ultra of British art, dominated Mr Frith in all that he did. The greatest of Mr Frith's merits was his power of arranging large groups, pleasantly breaking and combining both the masses of color and of light and shade, and of effectively and harmoniously balancing his compositions. It was first displayed at its very best in his large picture, "The Old English Merrymaking," very successfully followed up by the Elizabethan "Coming of Age," works which probably showed the artist at his nearest approximation to "high art." In 1854 he exhibited the first of those pictures with which liis name will be indissolubly linked, large and realistic representations of big groups of everyday people, dressed in the fashions of the moment, and engaged in some characteristic collective occupation. It was called "Ramsgate Sands." Four years later he finished his "Derby Day," which now hangs in the National Gallery, a splendidly representative specimen of what was once generally held to be best in our national art. So great was the excitement about this picture that it had to be especially railed off—a testimony of over-popularity paid to no picture since the days when Wilkie showed his "Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch" thirtysix years before. It was an honour, however, which subsequently had to be accorded to "The Railway Station" (now at the Royal Hollowav College), to the "Marriage of the Prince of Wales" (the Queen and Prince Albert were great admirers of Mr Frith's works, and good commission givers), to the "Private View," and to the "Road to Ruin" —a series of small pictures depicting the gambler's downfall, imitative of Hogarth's "Rake's Progress." At the very early age of 27 he was elected an A.R.A V becoming an li.A. at 33, by which time his realistic and dramatic power had made him perhaps the most widely popular of all English artists. Ho published in ISB7 his

'Autobiography," and iu 18S7 "Further Reminiscences." He retired from the Academy in 1890. Principal works: "Othello and Desdeniona." "Malvolio before the Countess Olivia" (1840), "Parting Interview between Leicester and Amy Robsart" (1841), "Vicar of Wakefield" (1542), "The Village Pastor" (1845), "English Merrvmaking a Hundred Years Ago" (1847), "Wicked Eyes ' (1852), "Life at the Seaside" (1854), "Before Dinner at Boswell's Lodgings (1S68), "Road to "Ruin" (187S), "Private View of the Royal Academy" (1881), "Mrs Grcsham rind Daughter" (1595),]