William Hull (artist)

After spending a year at the settlement at Wellhouse, near Mirfield in Yorkshire, as student and assistant, he went in 1838 to the Moravian establishment at Grace Hill, near Ballymena in Ireland, where he made many sketches.

From 1841 to 1844 he travelled in France, Germany, and the Low Countries as tutor to the two sons of a Mr Janvrin, a merchant of St Helier in Jersey, and took every opportunity of continuing his study of art.

His works in black and white and sepia were highly regarded by his contemporaries for their skill, although John Ruskin advised him to introduce more colour; later he also produced detailed fruit and flower paintings.

Langton said of Hull in the latter book: "It is most probable, I think, that had Charles Dickens lived to complete Edwin Drood, some of the views of Cloisterham given here would have been engraved as illustrations to the story."

Hull also drew some of the illustrations to John Parsons Earwaker's East Cheshire, Past and Present (1877–1881), and his drawings of the mill at Ambleside and Wythburn Church were reproduced in autotype.

These notes expressed his delight in the landscape of the Lake District, which he first saw in 1854, and which he described to his associates in the Letherbrow Club, a private literary and artistic society in Manchester which he had joined in 1848.

[3] Despite his residence in the Lake District, Hull continued to contribute works to the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, and also took some part in its management; he exhibited there regularly and studied in its life class.