Samuel Edmund Waller

Young Waller, was educated at Cheltenham College with a view to the army, but showing artistic inclinations was sent to the Gloucester School of Art, and later went through a course of architectural studies in his father's office.

At eighteen he entered the Royal Academy Schools, and three years later (1871) he exhibited his first pictures at Burlington House entitled A Winter's Tale and The Illustrious Stranger.

(1877), now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales; The Empty Saddle (1879), with an architectural setting taken from Burford Priory, Oxfordshire; Success!

Later works include The Day of Reckoning (1883), Peril (1886), The Morning of Agincourt (1888), In his Father's Footsteps (1889), Dawn (1890), One-and-Twenty (1891), The Ruined Sanctuary (1892), Alone!

[1] Old English country life strongly attracted his imagination, and furnished him with the romantic incidents which formed the subjects of his most notable pictures, and their backgrounds were frequently taken from Elizabethan houses in his native county or elsewhere in England.

[1] He died at his studio, Haverstock Hill, London, on 9 June 1903, after a long illness, and was buried at Golders Green.