George Henry Boughton

Inscriptionback to top

Inscr. in pencil bottom right: ‘sketch of G.H. Boughton, R.A.’.

This portraitback to top

This sketch was offered to the NPG by the critic Alfred Lys Baldry in March 1933. It had been drawn to accompany his article on Boughton published in an American paper in March 1889: ‘the sketch is a very fair likeness of him as he was then’.[1] The distinctive tam-o’-shanter cap appears in at least two other images of roughly the same date, Ralph Winwood Robinson’s photograph of the the artist in his studio (see ‘All known portraits, Photographs, reg. 1889’ for NPG x7353, and Leonard Raven-Hill’s sketch (see ‘All known portraits, By other artists, 1891’).

A.L. Baldry trained as a pupil of Albert Moore and was a member of the New English Art Club and the Pastel Society. He also worked in the theatre and as an art critic and is best known for his publications on contemporary painters.[2] Among these is a life of Boughton (1904)[3] and the preface to the catalogue of a Leicester Galleries exhibition (1905) of the works remaining in the artist’s studio at his death.

Boughton like Baldry could both write and paint. In an article ‘Our Artists in Europe’ Henry James praised his ability to ‘write in the manner of painters, with the bold, irreverent, unconventional, successful brush’.[4] By the 1870s he was affluent enough to be able to afford to commission one of the earliest ‘modern artists’ homes in London’, West House, Campden Hill by Richard Norman Shaw (1876).[5]

Carol Blackett-Ord

Footnotesback to top

1) Letter from A.L. Baldry to H.M. Hake, 16 Mar. 1933, NPG RP 2612.
2) Described as ‘peintre et littérateur’ in Bénézit 1999. For Baldry see also Who was Who 1967.
3) Baldry 1904.
4) James 1889.
5) Anon 1883, pp.838–44.

Physical descriptionback to top

Two heads, profile to left.

Provenanceback to top

The artist; offered as a gift to the NPG, 1933.

View all known portraits for George Henry Boughton