John Charles Dollman

• 1. Introduction

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  John Charles Dollman was born in Hove on the 6th of May 1851, and by the time he died in London on the 11th of December 1934, he had spent more than four decades exhibiting at the Royal Academy. His canvases ranged from mythological Vikings and wild animals to a group of wet horses standing in a London storm, and a solitary Antarctic explorer walking into the snow to die. What bound these seemingly unrelated scenes together was a painter who refused to settle into a single mode. Who commissioned the painting of Lawrence Oates, and why does it still hang in a private members' club? What made a Victorian cab stand worthy of multiple versions? And how did the work of an English illustrator reach the eyes of Vincent van Gogh?

• 2. From Hove to Bedford Park

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  South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools gave Dollman his formal training after he left Hove for London. Once his studies were complete, he established a studio at Bedford Park, the west London neighbourhood designed partly as an artistic community, and his own studio space there was designed by the architect Maurice Bingham Adams. From that base he began submitting work to the Royal Academy as early as 1870, a relationship that would continue for more than forty years, ending in 1912. He also took on illustrating commissions, contributing black-and-white and colour work to magazines including The Graphic during and after the 1880s. It was through that printed work reaching a wider audience that some of his early output was said to have influenced Van Gogh, an observation that places Dollman in an unexpected corner of European art history. In 1913, he was elected a Member of the Royal Watercolour Society, adding the letters RWS to the RI and ROI he already held.

• 3. Animals and Myth

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  A Viking Foray and a Viking horde he titled The Ravager placed Dollman squarely within the Victorian taste for mythological drama. He also completed Orpheus and His Lute with Lions, and a canvas showing a girl surrounded by chimps titled The Unknown, which he submitted to the Royal Academy in 1912. Those bold animal-and-figure compositions extended into literary territory as well: Robinson Crusoe and His Man Friday, Polo, and Mowgli Made Leader of the Bandar-log, which he finished in 1903. In the 1890s he turned toward soldiers, producing a series of military pictures before moving into wild animal scenes stripped of any story or narrative. The Ravager now belongs to the Trustees of the Royal Watercolour Society in London, while Ride of the Valkyries lives in the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. A version of The Unknown hangs in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle.

• 4. Cab Stand in the Rain

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  A London Cab Stand, painted in 1888, is possibly Dollman's best known work. Its subject is a group of horses caught in a stormy scene, a choice that anchored the composition firmly in the everyday rather than the mythological. Dollman found the image compelling enough to return to it repeatedly; he made at least three variants of the picture, and the pattern of copying or near-copying individual works appears elsewhere in his output as well. The original hangs in the Museum of London. A Dog's Home, Table d'Hote, finished in 1879, found its way to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and During the Time of the Sermonses from 1896, which he described in an unusual pairing of religious figures approaching two golfers, entered the collection of the Harris Museum in Preston. Famine, dated 1904, is now held at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery.

• 5. A Very Gallant Gentleman

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  The painting that may carry the most emotional weight in Dollman's career depicts Lawrence Oates at the moment he walked out of a tent in Antarctica to die. Officers of the Inniskilling Dragoons commissioned the work in 1913, the year after Oates perished on Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated polar expedition. Dollman titled it A Very Gallant Gentleman, and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1914. The painting now hangs in the Cavalry Club in London, where it has remained in the possession of a military institution rather than a public gallery. A preparatory sketch for the work surfaced later at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and when it was eventually sold by Christie's on behalf of a private owner, it fetched forty thousand pounds in 2014. The Immigrants' Ship, painted in 1884, traveled even farther from its maker; it resides today in the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

• 6. A Zoologist's Father

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  Dollman died in London on the 11th of December 1934, aged 83. He left behind not only a body of work scattered across galleries from Adelaide to Newcastle but also a son whose reputation extended into a different discipline entirely. Guy Dollman became a noted zoologist and taxonomist, a detail that positions John Charles Dollman as the father of scientific naming rather than just Victorian painting. The breadth of both careers offers a small window into a household where close observation of the natural world, whether recorded in paint or in specimen catalogues, was taken seriously.