Cattermole, George, 1800-1868

George Cattermole (10 August 1800 – 24 July 1868) was a British painter and illustrator, his paintings chiefly in watercolours. Unusually for watercolourists of the period, most of his paintings are figure scenes, often interiors with a crowd of figures, illustrating scenes from history or literature, or just genre scenes in historical costume, and he "became the foremost British historical painter in watercolours". He was a friend of Charles Dickens and many other literary and artistic figures. He declined both a knighthood and the presidency of the "Old" Watercolour Society (now the Royal Watercolour Society). After early success in his career, there was something of a crisis in the 1850s, when he largely gave up watercolours for a while, and failed to make an impact painting in oils. His health caused him problems, and he was greatly affected by the early deaths of two of his children in 1862 and 1863. He was fiercely criticized in Volume I of Modern Painters (1843) by John Ruskin; Ruskin's father at one point in the early 1840s owned four Cattermoles, and one remained on the drawing room wall in 1845. George Bernard Shaw wrote of a Cattermole exhibition in 1889: "The whole man is there—cloaks, daggers, armour, trapdoors, State barges, falcons, gauntlets, moats, keeps, serenades, anachronisms, and all. To Cattermole there was only one historic period—the past, with one appropriate costume. Fortunately it was a romantic, stately, chivalrous past, and the costume was handsome and becoming. He had imagination; and though, like Don Quixote's, it ran mostly on things that never existed, he could draw and paint them with the pleasantest ease, grace, and skill." Samuel Redgrave described his "brigands, armourers and pirates" as "rather types of their class than possessed of any distinct individuality, and thus, as he advanced in life, he worked himself out, resulting in tameness and want of variety". But when he chose to paint real historical figures, such as Charles I, the results were "feeble in comparison with his other paintings". Redgrave says that both landscapes and architectural details were studied with the eye and then painted from memory.