Artist: Richard Ansdell
Title: The English Gamekeeper
Dimensions (W x H ): Paper Size: 25 x 30 in | Image Size: 21 x 26 in
Edition | Medium: These are printed in black and white and hand coloured. | Paper
About the Art: Atelier Collection
About the Artist: At 14, Richard Ansdell was apprenticed to a portrait painter in Chatham. At 25, he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in London and he went on to achieve considerable fame in his lifetime, primarily as a painter of animal subjects, sporting scenes and romantic narrative pictures.
Born in 1815, Ansdell was a great lover of Scotland and he built himself a house called May Lodge at the head of Loch Faggan. When he was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint her dogs, he suggested that they be brought to his home since he preferred to paint in his own surroundings. Needless to say this was the end of his commission!
Though having to rely on few commissions, Ansdell worked in the 1840s and 1850s for several members of the aristocracy and, between 1840 and 1885, he exhibited 150 paintings at the Royal Academy, missing only one year, in 1850.
In 1855 his pictures Turning the Drove and The Wolf Slayer gained him a Third Class Gold Medal at the International Exhibition in Paris. Ansdell died in 1885.