SP 942 VE

 

GEORGE COLE

Portsmouth 1810 - 1883 London

 

Luncheon in a harvest field, Sussex

 

Signed

Canvas: 20 x 30 in / 51 x 76 cm

Painted circa 1874

 

Provenance:

J D Allcroft, Stokesay Court, Worcestershire

 

Exhibited:

London, Royal Society of British Artists, 1874, no 126

London, Richard Green, Exhibition of Victorian and Romantic Paintings, 1994, no. 9

 

 

 

 

George Cole was a Victorian artist who is generally admired for his beautiful landscapes, many of which were inspired by the scenery in Hampshire, Surrey, Cornwall, Wales and Sussex.  He was also an accomplished portraitist and animal painter.

 

Cole was born in Portsmouth in 1810 and was entirely self-taught until the age of thirty, when he took some lessons from the Scottish marine artist John Wilson.  Cole established his reputation with a large painting of tigers and elephants in the jungle which he painted for the Wombwell menagerie and exhibited at the Weyhill fair and Great Barthelemy Fair, where it attracted much attention.

 

Cole was greatly influenced by his study of seventeenth century Dutch painters whose works he would have seen in the homes of his eminent patrons, who included Edmund Peel, Sir J B Mill, General Yates and Admiral Codrington.

 

During his early life he remained in Portsmouth, but in 1852 he moved to London.  He resided in Fulham, moving to Kensington where he remained for the rest of his life.  He was a prolific artist and exhibited regularly at the principal London venues.  He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1849 and 1882, at the British Institution between 1839 and 1867 and at the Royal Society of British Artists of which he became a member in 1850, between 1852 and 1883.  He was awarded a medal for a landscape from The Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts.