Theodore Blake Wirgman Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Theodore Blake Wirgman was an English painter and etcher who moved to London, studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, became a painter of history and genre subjects and worked as a portrait artist for The Graphic. A number of these portraits are held at the National Portrait Gallery. Wirgman was born in Belgium and died in London. He worked from a studio at 24 Dawson Place, Notting Hill, London, and joined The Arts Club in 1892. Wirgman was part of a group of avant-garde young artists who emulated Edward Coley Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon. This group was made up of Walter Crane, Robert Bateman, Harry Ellis Wooldridge and Edward Clifford. He realized portraits of artists of his time among them this portrait of Ernest Albert Waterlow. Waterlow was an English painter. He was born in London and received the main part of his art education in the Royal Academy schools, where, in 1873, he gained the Turner medal for landscape-painting He was elected an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1880, a member in 1894, and president in 1897, an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1890 and academician in 1903 and he was knighted in 1902. He began to exhibit in 1872 and produced a considerable number of admirable landscapes, in oil and watercolor, handled with grace and distinction. One of his pictures, Galway Gossips, is in the Tate collection