Richard Burchett
Richard Burchett (1815–1875) was a British artist and educator on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who was for over twenty years the Headmaster of what later became the Royal College of Art.
He was later described as "a prominent figure in the art-schools, a well-instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally equipped with all the learning of his craft" by his ex-pupil, the poet Austin Dobson.
[1] As an artist he achieved some reputation for large history paintings, and decorated public buildings including parts of the Palace of Westminster and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but his View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight is seen by modern art historians as his best work.
[2] In 1845 he was a ringleader of students protesting to the Board of Trade about the teaching methods, in what was at the time a controversy that attracted a great deal of public attention, and finally a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry.
[14] Burchett exhibited five works, apparently all large history paintings, at the Royal Academy between 1847, including The Death of Marmion, "famous in its day" according to Hugh Thomas[15]) and 1873 (The Making of the New Forest).
[14] His best-known work in this genre is Sanctuary (RA, 1867), the snappy modern title for Edward IV Withheld by Ecclesiastics from Pursuing Lancastrian Fugitives into a Church, in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, showing an incident after the Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, during the Wars of the Roses.
[16] William Bell Scott has an anecdote of Burchett, who "had chosen the subject as a glorious example of the power of the Church and the faith of the prince at that blessed period in Merry England" failing to sell the painting to an "extreme Radical" shipping magnate: ""I admire the picture, Mr. Burchett, it is excellently painted, and I like it for its subject; these men in full armour won't go in, they won't end the day completely after risking all their lives, because of that old priest with the jack-in-the-box!
[11] However the work which has attracted the most attention and praise from critics in recent decades is what appears to be his "only known landscape",[18] View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight probably of 1855, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, who describe it as a "minor masterpiece".
[19] This small painting, which more closely approaches a Pre-Raphaelite landscape style, shows a half-harvested cornfield, with tools and jugs of the farm-workers piled up beside a corn stook.
But the only figures visible are two clearly middle-class women, no doubt part of the same party as the artist, one sitting against a stook reading a book, and the other walking with a parasol.
[21] Treatments of the almost identical view by William Dyce and James Collinson (Mother and Child, Mellon Centre, Yale[22]), both Burchett's colleagues at the school, are taken by Geoffrey Grigson to mean that the three artists were on a visit, or holiday, together.
He and his students decorated large medallions in the dome of the now-vanished Great Exhibition building of 1862 at South Kensington,[26] and he painted a window in the Greenwich Hospital.
[28] In 1861 the main school moved again to buildings adjoining (and now absorbed by) the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, and long after Burchett's death it became in 1896 The Royal College of Art.
Redgrave, drawing on Dyce's ideas, and propelled by Cole, set out the "South Kensington system", a highly specific syllabus for the teaching of art, which was to be dominant in the UK, and other English-speaking countries, at least until the end of the century, and not to entirely vanish until the 1930s.
[35] He was also at the studio sale of Augustus Egg, buying two paintings now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, probably on their behalf, although he also sold them works apparently from his collection, as well as his Sandown landscape (in 1861).
Portraits of the heavily-bearded Burchett include a marble bust by his pupil Henrietta Montalba in an elaborate pink alabaster frame designed by George Clausen that has followed the Royal College to its new Darwin Building on Kensington Gore, where it is installed in a courtyard.
[38] He was painted by Val Prinsep standing next to Lord Leighton in his Distribution of Art Prizes (1869, Victoria and Albert Museum),[39] and there is a wood engraving after an unknown artist, very likely a student (above) published with an obituary.
