Work Text:
Acklebury, John
English painter, 1791 - 1866
Father of Victorian naturalist writer Clara Acklebury (1825-1903)
Summary:
Known principally for his incisive portraits of members of the British nobility and London high society in the Regency and early Victorian eras, John Acklebury was also, in his later career, a landscape painter of some note. Many scholars of portraiture 1 consider Acklebury's work representative of both the Venetian and the English schools of Enlightenment-era realism, while a few see in his late works the beginnings of Impressionism. 2
Early Life:
John Acklebury was born February 27, 1791 at Winchester, Hampshire, U.K., one of a pair of fraternal twins, the only children of the Reverend Doctor George Acklebury and Marie-Louise Remillard Acklebury. Reverend Acklebury was the author of three books of sermons that enjoyed a vogue in the first years of the 19th century. Marie-Louise Acklebury was a French emigrée from the Remillard family of Lyon, France.
The twin children of Marie-Louise and George Acklebury were educated at home from the age of six until John went to Oxford at 17, in 1808. According to a privately published biography by Acklebury’s daughter Clara, it was Acklebury's passion for art that "proved the undoing of his reverend father's desire that he should follow in his footsteps to a life in service to God." 3
Acklebury spent two years at Oxford before apprenticing himself to Fiorio da Calvo in Venice, where he worked for four years. He returned to England in 1817, settled in London, and began his noteworthy career as a society portrait painter.
Artistic Career:
One of Acklebury's earliest works, Penrith After a Ride (1818), is his most celebrated. It portrays Tristan Jarrett, the Eighth Viscount Penrith (later the Ninth Earl of Barringford), at the age of 23, and is noted for its vivid realism and informality. The portrait, which depicts its aristocratic subject in a state of partial undress, created a minor scandal, and prompted a caricature in the London Times by the cartoonist George Cruikshank. 4Penrith After a Ride made Acklebury a celebrity in Regency London, and he went on to become wealthy from his insightful portraits of London society's notables over the next thirty years.
Penrith After A Ride, by John Acklebury, 1818. In the National Portrait Gallery, London
Acklebury turned to landscape painting late in life, and produced a series of intense, moody sea- and cloudscapes deemed variously "the maudlin rants, in paint, of an old and bitter man," 5 and "collectively the finest evocation of grief in the English painting vernacular." 6
Biographical details:
Though Acklebury left no self-portraits, his painting master, Fiorio da Calvo, used him as the model for the Archangel Gabriel in a fresco of the Last Judgment in the church of San Sebastiano in Venice, where it can still be seen today.
Il Giudizio Universale (detail), Fiorio da Calvo, c. 1816, San Sebastiano Church, Venice
Acklebury’s other admirers in Venice included both Cecilia and Antonio Moretti, of the celebrated Moretti family of musicians. 7
John Acklebury married Georgina Jennings in 1822, and they had two daughters, Clara and Louisa, and a son, George, who died in infancy. Georgina Acklebury died of influenza in 1842, and John never remarried. He lived with his daughter, the noted Victorian naturalist-writer and biographer Clara Acklebury, for much of the rest of his life, and died in 1866 at the age of 71, in his London home.
Rumors of homosexuality followed Acklebury all his life, based in large part on his lifelong friendship with his first famous subject, the Ninth Earl of Barringford, whose homosexuality was an open secret. 8
Upon Lord Barringford’s death in 1855, his widow donated Penrith After A Ride to a then-fledgling London public art collection that is now known as the National Portrait Gallery. In 2002, conservators removed the portrait for cleaning and re-framing, and discovered hidden behind the canvas five charcoal and pencil sketches of a young man identified as "Tristan", two of them nudes.9 Though unsigned, they are almost certainly Acklebury's work.
One of the nude sketches found behind the backing of Acklebury's most famous portrait
Anna Powers, a descendant of the Jarrett family, successfully sued for possession of the drawings, and sold them through Sotheby’s to a private collector in 2006 for an undisclosed sum.
1. Ronson, Patrick: The Victorian Portrait, 1992. London, St Martins Press ↩
2. Regardie, Charlotte-Marie: Leuers de l'Impressionisme dans les paysages éroïques de l'aube du 19e siècle, 1987. Paris, Mors et Fils↩
3. Marietta, Joanne: A Life in the Wild: The Collected Letters of Clara Acklebury, 2004. Los Angeles, University of California Press.↩
4. "It is difficult for 21st century western viewers, particularly Americans, to appreciate the ‘shock value’ of Penrith After a Ride, when even half-nude photographs of the President of the United States cause little stir." Beckett, Sr Wendy: "Sister Wendy's American Collection" WBGH Television, 2005↩
5. Willoughby, Marcus J, in an interview with David Frost on BBC 1, 1972↩
6. Cazalet, Georges: "Visite aux plus grands musées d'art à Londres" Paris Match Magazine, June 1956↩
7. According to Primo Fortinescu in Moretti, the well-known art songs "Per il battito del mio cuore" and "Angelo crudele! non torni da mi!" were probably inspired by Acklebury↩
8. Ronson, Patrick: ibid↩
9. "Surprise! Naughty Pictures Discovered at National Portrait Gallery" by Sandip Basetty, London Times, October 22, 2002↩