On view through 9 September 2007
John Linnell (1792-1882) was one of the most successful and admired Victorian artists. Brought up in Bloomsbury, London, where his father was a frame maker and picture dealer, Linnell was a precocious talent. As a child he would copy the works of the popular artist, George Morland, for his father, who sold them to clients. He began his formal art training at the Royal Academy Schools aged thirteen, and found companionship with older students including Benjamin Robert Haydon and David Wilkie. Linnell shared lodgings with William Mulready, an artist he intensely admired, and a small portrait of Mulready in the Gallery's Collection, painted by Linnell in 1833, testifies to their lasting friendship.
From the beginning, Linnell was committed to painting landscapes. Brought up in the heart of the city, he spent much of his time as a student sketching on the banks of the Thames, under the supervision of his master, the watercolourist John Varley. Linnell had a strong Christian faith, and his approach to landscape was affected by his conversion from Anglicanism to the Baptist church in 1811(he later rejected organised religion in favour of his own interpretation of the scriptures). Linnell saw nature as direct proof of God's existence and believed that 'truth to nature' in his work was a moral duty.
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