Inchbold the artist

Sometimes in you go to a museum or gallery because you know what is going to be displayed; sometimes you go to see a particular artist, maybe knowing pieces of his or her work. It’s wonderful to see in real life pictures and sculptures that you have only previously seen in books or magazines or as reproductions, and exciting to find new work by the artist that you didn’t previously know.

I once went to an exhibition of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby because I had seen an article about him in a newspaper with one of the pictures which was going to be exhibited. I fell in love with Joseph  finding so much more of his work and so much more in his work.

Other times you mosey along to a gallery not knowing what or who you might find displayed. So it was when I went to the Ashmolean; there were some wonderful paintings by people I had heard of and knew… and then this picture jumped out at me. How odd, I thought, a photograph in among all these paintings. I was wrong, it was a painting among paintings.

This is ‘A Study In March’ by John William Inchbold, who was born in 1830 and died before he was sixty, in 1888. He was son of Thomas and Rachel Inchbold, his father was a newspaper proprietor in Leeds. By the age of seventeen he was studying at the Royal Academy and then spent much of his life abroad but died back home in Leeds.

In 1841, there is a John Inchbold  living with his mother on Briggate, Leeds, and his a sister also called Rachel, and twins Eliza and Henry. Was this the same Inchbold family? Possibly not but by 1851 this Rachel  is head of the household, and the press; her occupation is described as printer & stationer, and John, probably not the artist John William, is her only child at home is lithographer. Although he doesn’t appear in the 1851 census, John’s brother Henry is also in the business, he is a stationer printer master, and is married with two little children; he goes on to have three more. Rachel had married, either Adam Armstrong or Andrew Redmond and her sister Eliza had married William Mountain and had three little children.  Even if this family is not directly related to Inchbold the artist, they may have been cousins; he came home to Headingley in Leeds in 1888 where he died unexpectedly.