Albany Fine Art : Biography of Sir Ernest Albert WATERLOW, RA, PRWS

Sir Ernest Albert WATERLOW, RA, PRWS

British, 1850-1919

Sir Ernest Waterlow
by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, RA
© Royal Academy of Arts, London

Landscape painter who achieved notable success with his idyllic scenes which captured the essence of the English countryside

Ernest Albert Waterlow was born in London in 1850, the son of a lithographer. His parents encouraged his early interest in art as an antidote to his poor health. He attended Cary’s School of Art and then followed in the footsteps of the Pre-Raphaelite landscapists to study and paint in Heidelberg, Germany and Lausanne, Switzerland, where he fell in love with the mountains and valleys of the Bernese Oberland.

On his return to London in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. The following year he won the Turner Gold Medal for landscape painting and exhibited his first picture, Evening in Dovedale, Devonshire, at the Royal Academy. The following year he gained a further Gold Medal for a landscape entitled The Landstorm. He continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy almost every year and gained official recognition in 1887 when his Galway Gossip was bought for the National Collection. He was elected ARA in 1890, RWS in 1894, and President of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1897. In 1902 he was knighted, and the following year became a full Academician of the Royal Academy.

Waterlow painted in both in oil and watercolour and exhibited widely, including 206 works at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and 177 at the Royal Academy. His work was influenced by John Constable, RA (British, 1776-1837), George Hemming Mason, ARA (British, 1818-1872) and Frederick (Fred) Walker, RWS, ARA (British, 1840-1875) and the French school of naturalistic painting. The latter is best exampled in the works of the Barbizon School, which took its name from the village of the same name some 30 miles from Paris and which became a centre for plein air painting.

He painted mainly along the English coast, in Suffolk, Dorset and Cornwall (he was at Newlyn before the Newlyn School), as well as in Ireland, France, Germany and Switzerland and he continued to reminisce over the haunting beauty of the Swiss Alps throughout his life, and particularly during the unsettling years leading up to and during the First World War. Between 1913 and 1916 at least nine of his 23 exhibits at the Royal Academy were Swiss subjects.

He died in 1919 and the studio sale of his work was held at Christie's the following year. Memorial exhibitions were held at the Fine Art Society in 1920 and at the Royal Academy in 1922. His work is represented in several public collections.