Wynford Dewhurst

Although he originally trained to enter the legal profession, he showed artistic flair and decided to pursue a career as a painter after some of his drawings were published in various journals.

He gained artistic training in France at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (at which time he changed his name to Wynford Dewhurst by deed poll),[4] where he was a pupil of the renowned French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme.

"[9][10] The thesis that Dewhurst put forward in Impressionist Painting was controversial, for it dealt with the debated question of whether Impressionism was French or British in origin.

For example, he discovered the violet light found in Monet's mid-day canvases: I remember distinctly, during the summer of 1901, at Les Andelys-on-Seine, that upon two days and for two hours in the afternoons of those days all Nature, animate and inanimate, bore the aspect of things seen under a strong glare of violet light, exactly as though a tinted glass were suspended between the sun's rays and the earth.

Highlights and shadows are attenuated almost to extinction, whilst in this dull purple glare the heat became more intense than ever, possibly through lack of wind, for all was still.

The Picnic (1908), a celebrated picture which exemplifies the influence of Monet in its use of small dabs of colour, resulting in an optical blend of hues when seen from a distance, is in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery.

This is especially evident in a series of paintings he produced in the valley of La Creuse, where the bright, almost garish palette again recalls Monet, although in some instances they achieve "an unintended Fauvist intensity.