Richard Burchett (1815 – 27 May 1875) was a British artist and educator on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who was for over twenty years the Headmaster of what later became the Royal College of Art.
He was later described as "a prominent figure in the art-schools, a well-instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally equipped with all the learning of his craft" by his ex-pupil, the poet Austin Dobson. Burchett's pupils included the extremely varied talents of Kate Greenaway, Christopher Dresser, Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), Sir George Clausen, Sir Luke Fildes, Gertrude Jekyll, Hubert von Herkomer, Evelyn De Morgan, William Harbutt, Henrietta Montalba, and Helen Allingham. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Queen Victoria's daughter, and a talented artist, was also a student.MacDonald:173 describes Rosa Bonheur as a "student", but this seems dubious. She may have visited for a time before taking over her father's position running an art school for girls, the "École Gratuite de Dessins des Jeunes Filles" in 1849. Thompson described her headmaster as a "bearded, velvet-skull-capped and cold-searching-eyed man".Devereux, Jo. (2016). The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professional. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland.
As an artist he achieved some reputation for large history paintings, and decorated public buildings including parts of the Palace of Westminster and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but his View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight is seen by modern art historians as his best work. Burchett published collections of his lectures as text-books for the South Kensington system of art education, which he helped to devise.
Life
Burchett was born in Brighton on 30 January 1815. He attended the "London Mechanics Institute" in Chancery Lane (founded 1823, the forerunner of Birkbeck College, University of London), before in about 1841 entering the "Government School of Design", founded three years before in 1837, which he was later to head, and which eventually became the Royal College of Art.DNB, V&A In 1845 he was a ringleader of students protesting to the Board of Trade about the teaching methods, in what was at the time a controversy that attracted a great deal of public attention, and finally a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry.Elizabeth Bonython and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: the Life and Work of Henry Cole, V&A Publications, London, p.150. He gave evidence to this in 1846-7, by which time he had become a master at the school (the "Master of Form", from 1845), remaining on the staff until his death in 1875, from 1852 as Headmaster.V&A says from 1851 as Head of the "Department of Practical Art" section, for training teachers.
Burchett spent most of his time throughout his adult life on his work at the school, and that his most highly regarded work today is an atypical landscape subject is an indication of how much his personal painting was neglected for teaching, and public commissions through the school. According to the Memoirs of William Bell Scott, who had worked under him, Burchett was: "an able, self-dependent actor in the affairs of life, yet one whose action was rarely to his own benefit, although largely to the benefit of those under him in his official position".Scott, 272
In the mid-1850s, Burchett converted to Roman Catholicism; it is presumed that he was influenced by the already-converted Pre-Raphaelite James Collinson, with whom he was living after Collinson's engagement to Christina Rossetti had broken down for the second time.DNB He married twice, and had several children. What appear to be a son and grandson are recorded exhibiting paintings in London. Ebenezer Stanley Burchett (1837–1916) worked at South Kensington and then was Head Master of the Bedford Park School of Arts & Crafts.In 1875, he was at 20 Brompton Sq., where he registered a patent "for improvements in boxes for containing matches and other articles" - London Gazette, March 29, 1878, p. 2259. By 1878 he had moved to Ravenscourt Park, where he played a crucial role in developing the present public park. Obituary of Mr E. S. Burchett by F.E. Hayes, A.R.C.A., F.R.G.S. West London Observer 24 March 1916 In 1870 Richard Burchett is described as "formerly of 43 Brompton Square [very near the School], but now of 8 Bedford Road, Clapham." Burchett was in very bad health for the last years of his life, and when he died in Dublin, on 27 May 1875, he was staying with his wife's uncle, Sir Samuel Ferguson, for his health. He had only been in the School for 133 days in 1872, arriving punctually on only seven of these.Frayling:52
In 1870, he began proceedings for bankruptcy, which were still not concluded by his death. Scott says he "took to a sort of farming at considerable expense ... He began to get into deep water, and into the hands of 20 per cent money-lenders. Still he fought bravely with his difficulties, and even when his large salary was placed under trustees, he went on with his historic subjects".Scott, 272-273 His venture was ill-timed, hitting a period of agricultural depression. A series of twelve dividends to his creditors, between 1871 and September 1876, paid off at least 7s 7d in the pound - dividends number 1, 7 & 8 seem not to appear in the London Gazette search results.Brompton Square was home to many artists, writers and actors etc Survey of London Artists, musicians and writers resident in Brompton, 1790–1870. Charles Dickens, Jr. (eldest child of Charles Dickens) wrote in his 1879 book Dickens's Dictionary of London that "[Brompton] was at one time almost exclusively the artist quarter and is still largely frequented by the votaries of the brush and chisel, though of late years Belgravia has been encroaching upon its boundaries, and Belgravian rents are stealing westward." His will was probated at less than £200, and Frayling records that a letter from his widow asking for a pension was found unanswered in the school files thirteen years later.Frayling Obituaries were published in the Athenaeum, the Art Journal, and The Graphic.V&A
Artist
Burchett exhibited five works, apparently all large history paintings, at the Royal Academy between 1847, including The Death of Marmion, "famous in its day" according to Hugh ThomasArticles in El País, probably quoting another source.) and 1873 (The Making of the New Forest). These are rather generously described as "in the Pre-Raphaelite style" by the DNB. He exhibited a work at the British Institution in 1855. His best-known work in this genre is Sanctuary (RA, 1867), the snappy modern title for Edward IV Withheld by Ecclesiastics from Pursuing Lancastrian Fugitives into a Church, in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, showing an incident after the Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, during the Wars of the Roses.Image The two titles are mentioned separately by the DNB, who give the Guildhall Sanctuary, but there seems only to be the one painting (exhibited RA 1867)
William Bell Scott has an anecdote of Burchett, who "had chosen the subject as a glorious example of the power of the Church and the faith of the prince at that blessed period in Merry England" failing to sell the painting to an "extreme Radical" shipping magnate: ""I admire the picture, Mr. Burchett, it is excellently painted, and I like it for its subject; these men in full armour won't go in, they won't end the day completely after risking all their lives, because of that old priest with the jack-in-the-box! Superstition, you see, turns them into caitiffs!" This knocked over poor Burchett so much, the transaction came to nothing"Scott, 274-275 Scott comments that Burchett: "gave himself up to historical painting on a rather large scale, just the kind of art which English taste and the R. Academy as the mediocre exponent of the same would like to crush out of existence".
However the work which has attracted the most attention and praise from critics in recent decades is what appears to be his "only known landscape",So the DNB, but Howard D. Rodee: The "Dreary Landscape" as a Background for Scenes of Rural Poverty in Victorian Paintings, Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer, 1977) refers to another, also a view of the Isle of Wight: "Scene in the Isles (sic) of Wight" of 1865. This has cheerful farmworkers' children, so must be a different work. View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight probably of 1855, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, who describe it as a "minor masterpiece".For quote, search online collection on Burchett (accessed February 15, 2008). V&A image This small painting, which more closely approaches a Pre-Raphaelite landscape style, shows a half-harvested cornfield, with tools and jugs of the farm-workers piled up beside a corn stook. But the only figures visible are two clearly middle-class women, no doubt part of the same party as the artist, one sitting against a stook reading a book, and the other walking with a parasol. Any georgic or realist focus on agriculture is absent "his cornfield is just part of a landscape where middle-class people take their leisure. The corn is no more or no less useful than the beaches which we imagine to be in the distance of this brilliantly coloured painting".Rosenthal:130 Here too a more subtle hint of religious feeling is found: "the church in the distance hints at the source of the bounty represented by the partially garnered harvest in the foreground fields".Christie's Catalogue, King St, Sale 7279, Lot 219 Showing a Preference, John Calcott Horsley, R.A. (1817–1903). - Horsley was also a colleague of Burchett's Treatments of the almost identical view by William Dyce and James Collinson (Mother and Child, Mellon Centre, YaleCollinson Image The Mellon Centre now date this 1849-50 however. Burchett sold his painting to the V&A in 1861.), both Burchett's colleagues at the school, are taken by Geoffrey Grigson to mean that the three artists were on a visit, or holiday, together.Grigson, G, Britain Observed, 1975, pp 134–7, ref. in V&A, Dyce, like Burchett, was an artist who saw himself as a history painter but is now most often remembered for a single Pre-Raphaelitish landscape, his Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858.
There are a number of public paintings by Burchett, with help of his students, commissioned through the school. He and his students painted, from Renaissance portraits, a number of full-length portraits of the House of Tudor for the royal antechamber to the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster (1855-9).Lady Jane Grey image He painted other works for the new Palace, including a large Spanish Armada scene The English Fleet Pursuing the Spanish Fleet Against Fowey, copying from an 18th-century print a one of a set of tapestries made for Lord Howard of Effingham, the victorious admiral. The death of Prince Albert brought the project to reproduce the full set to an end, but it was revived in the 21st century, and finally completed in 2010.History Today; Image, Palace of Westminster Like the works in the Palace by better-known painters like Dyce, these have been generally disliked by critics from their first unveiling; the overall painting of the Palace after its rebuilding was probably the largest public painting commission in England during the 19th century, and, unlike the architecture of the Palace, has been regarded as very disappointing by most critics from the start.
From a number of designs for mosaics for the exteriors to the south court of the Victoria and Albert Museum he produced William Torrell (two versions in fact) and William of Wykeham. The mosaics remain in place, and two of the cartoons are now themselves on display in the staircase on the Exhibition Road side of the building. He and his students decorated large medallions in the dome of the now-vanished Great Exhibition building of 1862 at South Kensington,Survey of London and he painted a window in the Greenwich Hospital.