John William Inchbold

Having shown an early talent for drawing he moved to London[1] and became a draughtsman in the lithographic works of Day and Haghe.

[2] At first he worked in watercolour in a free style, but his first exhibited oil painting, shown at the Academy in 1852 showed the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement,[1] and in 1855 he gained the enthusiastic praise of John Ruskin for The Moorland, which he painted to illustrate a passage from Tennyson's Locksley Hall.

[1] His best-known works are probably On the Lake of Thun (1860), Tintagel (1862), Gordale Scar (1876) and Drifting (1883); the last named was once in the possession of Coventry Patmore.

Tennyson, Browning, Lord Houghton, and Sir Henry Thompson were among his admirers and supporters, and in Dr Russell Reynolds he found a liberal and discriminating patron.

A year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent.