William Blake Richmond

• 1. Introduction

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  William Blake Richmond carried a poet's name into a painter's life. Born on the 29th of November 1842 in Marylebone, he was named after the poet William Blake, a close friend of his father, the portrait painter George Richmond. That inheritance of names turned out to be oddly fitting. Richmond would spend his life moving between art forms, between countries, and between centuries of artistic tradition, ending up at the centre of one of the most controversial decorative projects in Victorian Britain.

  What draws us to Richmond is not just the mosaics glittering inside St Paul's Cathedral, or the stained-glass windows in village churches, or even the environmental campaign he launched against London's choking coal smoke. It is the way a single person could stand at the junction of so many things: ancient Byzantine colour, Arts and Crafts craft-making, portrait commissions in the north of England, anatomy study at St Bartholomew's Hospital, and a heated argument with John Ruskin over the merits of Michelangelo. How did a boy who sold his first painting for £20 and spent the proceeds touring Italy become the man who spent thirteen years remaking the interior of a cathedral?

• 2. A Father's Shadow, A Poet's Name

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  George Richmond's household in Marylebone was not a typical place to grow up. His father was a prominent portrait painter, his godfather in spirit was the visionary poet William Blake, and young Richmond was educated at home because of childhood health problems. When he finally entered a formal institution, it was the Royal Academy of Art in 1858, at the age of fourteen, where he spent three years studying drawing and painting.

  He also moved in the orbit of John Ruskin, spending time at the art critic's house and receiving private lessons from him. That proximity shaped Richmond's eye and his ambitions. In 1859, a year into his Academy training, he completed his first picture, Enid and Geraint. He sold it for £20, which he immediately used to travel to Italy for six weeks with a tutor. The Old Masters he encountered there, particularly Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and Giotto, became touchstones he would return to for the rest of his career.

• 3. The Portrait Years

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  By the age of nineteen, Richmond had his first major work hung at the Royal Academy, a portrait of his two brothers that earned high praise from Ruskin himself. The response set the course for the next decade and a half. Portrait commissions followed, some carrying Richmond to the north of England for months at a time. He also studied anatomy at St Bartholomew's Hospital, treating painting not as an instinctive gift but as a discipline with a scientific foundation.

  His relationship with the Royal Academy across these years was not uncomplicated. Elected in 1861, he exhibited there until 1877, then broke away to show work at the Grosvenor Gallery through 1878. He returned in 1888 as an Associate Member, became a full Royal Academician in 1895, and served as Professor of Painting on two separate stints: 1895-1899 and 1909-1911. He was still exhibiting with the Academy as late as 1916 and was elected Senior RA in 1920, just a year before his death.

  The 1880s brought a different kind of wandering. Richmond travelled repeatedly to Italy, Greece, Spain, and Egypt, spending months each year drawing and making coloured sketches. He was absorbing what he described, through his practice rather than his words, as the vibrancy of Byzantine and early Christian colour, a palette that would soon find a permanent home in one of London's most visited buildings.

• 4. Five Years as Slade Professor

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  In 1878, Richmond stepped into a post that placed him in formal succession to one of the most powerful voices in Victorian art. He became Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, taking over from his friend and mentor John Ruskin. The role carried a load of twelve lectures a year.

  For several years the friendship held. Then Richmond gave lectures on Michelangelo, the Italian Renaissance master who was his personal favourite, and Ruskin objected. Ruskin had little regard for Michelangelo, and the disagreement was sharp enough that Richmond resigned his professorship after five years, in 1883. What is notable is what came after: the two men maintained their long friendship in spite of the break. The argument was about aesthetics, not affection. Richmond had met Frederic Leighton and Giovanni Costa while living in Rome during the 1860s, and admired both painters. He was comfortable moving through different circles and holding his own views, even when those views clashed with the people who had shaped him.

• 5. Remaking St Paul's

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  In 1882, Richmond gave a lecture on monumental decoration in British churches, describing them as "caves of white-washed sepulchres, uncoloured, or if coloured at all, only in parts, patchily, and with little general idea of design." Nine years later, he had the chance to do something about it.

  In 1891, Richmond began work on the quire and apse of St Paul's Cathedral, a project that would occupy him until 1904. He did not simply design the mosaics and hand them off to craftsmen. He worked as both designer and craftsman through the installation. Influenced by Byzantine and early Christian work he had studied in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he designed over seventy allegorical mosaic panels, along with spandrels and ornamental ceiling decoration.

  His technical approach was deliberate. Richmond rejected the flat surface favoured by mosaicists such as Salviati, choosing instead to set jagged, irregular glass at angles to the plaster so it would catch and scatter the light differently at different moments of the day. The effect was a complete renewal of the quire, with decorations painted directly onto existing architectural features and stained-glass windows.

  The public reaction, when the work was finished, was not uniformly admiring. Critics argued the mosaics were not sufficiently British in character and did not belong in a cathedral. A debate ran through the 1890s, one that partly reflected a broader theological argument between High Church ornament and Low Church plainness. Richmond had expected resistance. He had spent nine years thinking about the problem before he picked up a tool.

• 6. Glass, Colour, and Craft

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  Working on St Paul's drew Richmond into collaboration with Harry James Powell of James Powell and Sons, glassmakers. Together they developed new colours for the mosaic glass being installed in the cathedral. Those colours, and the combinations Richmond devised, were absorbed into the standard Powell glass palette from the early 1890s onward. Heavier than earlier glass, often streaked with light veins of colour, the new material expanded what stained-glass artists could achieve.

  Richmond applied what he had learned in mosaic to windows. His five-light east window in the chancel of St Mary's Church, Stretton, East Staffordshire, completed in 1896, translated mosaic technique into glass: the surface of the glass was roughly painted to resemble the fractured, reflective quality of mosaic. The three-light north and south chancel windows at St Mary's, completed in 1898, carried the same approach, using heavy leading and glass with a sparkling appearance. The raw materials included thick slabs of glass streaked with light veins of colour, material that may have also appeared in his cathedral work.

  Between 1904 and 1910, Richmond designed three large windows for the Lady Chapel of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London. Across all of this work, his influence on the Arts and Crafts Movement was practical and material rather than merely inspirational: he and Powell had actually changed what artists could put in a window.

• 7. Coal Smoke and Clean Air

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  Richmond was also paying attention to what London's air was doing to light itself. He grew increasingly frustrated with the low light levels in winter caused by coal smoke, and in 1898 he wrote a letter to The Times describing the darkness as "comparable to a total eclipse of the sun." The same year, he founded the Coal Smoke Abatement Society.

  The Society went on to become the oldest environmental non-governmental organisation in the United Kingdom, eventually becoming Environmental Protection UK. Richmond wrote magazine articles and gave public lectures on the dangers of coal smoke. The man who had spent years crafting mosaics to catch and concentrate light inside a cathedral had turned to protecting the light outside it. His bronze sculpture of a Greek runner, donated to his village of Hammersmith, and his Arts-and-Crafts monument to William Gladstone in St Deiniol's Church in Hawarden, Flintshire, show that his energies never settled into a single medium or cause. He died at Beavor Lodge, his home in Hammersmith, on the 11th of February 1921, having been elected Senior Royal Academician just the year before.