PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

BENJAMIN WILLIAMS LEADER R.A. (BRITISH 1831-1923)
On the Thames, near Pangbourne
signed and dated B.W.LEADER/1874 (lower left)
oil on board
40 x 61 cm

PROVENANCE:
Polak Gallery, King Street, London SW1
Purchased from the above by the present owner in 1990

Catalogue Note

Benjamin Williams Leader came from the well-known Williams family of artists. In 1857 he transposed his names taking Leader as his surname in 1857, to distinguish himself from the many other artist members of the Williams family.

In 1854 Leader enrolled at the Royal Academy School, where he encountered the influence of contemporary Pre-Raphaelitism. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1854, his early exhibited paintings being domestic and genre subjects. In 1856, a landscape painting of Leader’s was bought from the Birmingham Society of Artists by FREDERICK WILLIAM HULME (1816-1884) himself a landscape painter who encouraged Leader to specialise in landscape subjects. In 1857 Leader’s A Stream from the Hills was referred to by John Ruskin in Academy Notes as ‘elaborate and valuable’. A diary entry for 1859, in which Leader records that he was then striving ‘faithfully and simply [to] copy nature’, indicates his allegiance to Ruskinian principles.