WALLIS, Henry

(b. 1830 London, d. 1916 Croydon)

English painter, writer and collector. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1848. He is also thought to have trained in Paris at some time in the late 1840s or early 1850s. He specialized in portraits of literary figures and scenes from the lives of past writers. His first great success was the Death of Chatterton (Tate Britain, London) which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. The painting was universally praised, not least by John Ruskin, who described it as ‘faultless and wonderful’, advising visitors to ‘examine it well, inch by inch’.

The success of Chatterton was such that, when exhibited in Manchester the following year, it was protected from the jostling crowds by a policeman. It was bought by another artist, Augustus Egg.

Wallis’s next success came in 1858 with the exhibition at the Royal Academy of The Stonebreaker (Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham). Accompanied by quotations from Tennyson’s poem ‘A Dirge’ (1830) and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34), its theme was the human cost of hard labour and poverty. It showed a dead stone-breaker slumped by the roadside in a symbolically twilit landscape.

In the early 1860s, Wallis was an exhibitor, along with various Pre-Raphaelites at the Hogarth Club, London. He also continued to show history paintings, many with a literary theme, at the Royal Academy until 1877. He was also a prolific watercolourist, exhibiting over 80 examples at the Old Water-Colour Society, to which he was elected in 1880.

He travelled widely in Europe and the Near East; many of his later paintings show scenes or events witnessed during his travels. In late life, he made less impact as a painter than he did as an authority on Italian and oriental ceramics, about which, during the last two decades of his life, he wrote several books and articles, many of them illustrated by his own drawings. He also built up a huge collection of ceramics, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the 1890s, he was also involved in campaigns to preserve ancient Egyptian monuments.

Death of Chatterton

The impoverished late 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who while still in his teens had poisoned himself in despair, was a romantic hero for many young and struggling artists in Wallis’s day. Wallis depicted the poet dead in his London garret, the floor strewn with torn fragments of manuscript and, tellingly, an empty phial near his hand.

The painting was universally praised, not least by John Ruskin who described it as ‘faultless and wonderful’, advising visitors to ‘examine it well, inch by inch’.

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The Stonebreaker

The Stonebreaker depicts a manual labourer who appears to be asleep, worn out by his work, but may have been worked to death. Wallis gave no outright statement that the man depicted was dead, but there are many suggestions to this effect. The frame was inscribed with a line paraphrased from Tennyson’s A Dirge (1830): “Now is thy long day’s work done”; the muted colours and setting sun give a feeling of finality; the man’s posture indicates that his hammer has slipped from his grasp as he was working rather than being laid aside while he rests, and his body is so still that a stoat, only visible on close examination, has climbed onto his right foot.

Although Wallis was not the first to portray such hardships, his painting attracted much attention through its combination of shocking realism and glorious sunset.

After The Death of Chatterton, The Stonebreaker was the other major success of Wallis’s relatively brief Pre-Raphaelite period. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858 and was highly rated by Ruskin who wrote of the painting, ‘On the whole, to my mind, the picture of the year; and but narrowly missing being a first-rate of any year.’

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