Janette stokes remembers Frederic William Burton, whose acquisition of old masters during his tenure at London’s National Gallery demonstrated judgement, while his own work consistently struck at the pivotal moment of a scene
In an unfinished biographical account of the Irish artist Frederic William Burton (1816-1900), his life-long family friend, Margaret Stokes, attempted to capture the essence of his life from the few details she had to hand following his death in the spring of 1900. Her chronological but fragmentary account, no doubt written in grief, goes no further than the 1860s. Despite having access to his notebooks and papers while preparing for a posthumous exhibition of his work in Dublin, it is surprising that she appears to have had little knowledge of his personal life. Stokes wrote to a number of friends and acquaintances to seek help in filling in the gaps, including a series of letters written to the artist Sarah Purser. Stokes confessed to her that she had been requested to prepare a memoir of his life and work, and was searching for information, in particular between the year 1830 ‘when he was learning drawing under West’ to 1851 ‘when he left for Munich.’ She wrote a number of letters daily to Purser asking a variety of questions and offered a few details of her own, such as how George Petrie told her that Burton ‘as a young artist won 1st prize for his drawing of the Elgin Marbles at the Dublin Society’
Stephanie McBride reflects on the extraordinary life’s work of Arthur Fields, the last of the street photographers
All around the globe, conflicts have and continue to shape the land and their inhabitants’; Elizabeth Magill explores the flipside of the buccolic in conversation with Brian McAvera.