Henry Holiday (17 June 1839 – 15 April 1927)[1] was an English Victorian painter of historical genre and landscapes, also a stained-glass designer, illustrator, and sculptor.

Through his friendship with Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon he was introduced to the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Other pictures include: Holiday spent much time at the studios of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, where groups of artists would meet to discuss, exchange and pool ideas.

Holiday also created some sculpture, in 1861 producing a piece called Sleep which attracted favourable critical interest.

On his return to England in 1872, he commissioned architect Basil Champneys to design a new family home in Branch Hill, Hampstead, which was named "Oak Tree House".

[12] Holiday's illustration to the chapter The Banker's Fate might contain pictorial references to the etching The Image Breakers by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, to William Sidney Mount's painting The Bone Player, and to a photograph by Benjamin Duchenne used for a drawing in Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.

These were exhibited at Walker's Gallery, London, in March 1908 jointly with Mothersole who had been working on Egyptian archaeological drawings and watercolours since 1903/4.

Between 1912 and 1919 he painted the apse of the east end of St Benedict's Church at Small Heath, Birmingham, depicting Christ in Glory with angels, and saints in arcading, below, in Byzantine style.

The family were close acquaintances of Myra Sadd Brown and Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, and had organised local suffragette meetings in the Lake District.