Alexander Wallace Rimington

Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854-1918), A.R.E., R.B.A, Hon. F.S.A. was an etcher, painter, illustrator, author and Professor of Fine Arts at Queen's College, London. He also invented a keyboard instrument that was designed to project different colours in harmony with music.

Rimington was born in London, England on 9 October 1853. His mother was Annette Hannah Cartwright (1827-1878), daughter of Susan and William Bentley Cartwright. His father, Alexander Rimington (1827-1868), was a banker/merchant with business interests in India in partnership with his brothers and brother-in-law, Henry Durancé Cartwright. In 1865 their business - referred to in the UK as Rimington, Cartwright and Co. and in Bombay, India as Leckie and Co. - took a reversal and failed. In consequence, Alexander Rimington signed over his estates and effects to the creditors of the business. He died on August 8, 1868 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, at the age of 41. He was buried in All Saints Church, Selsley, Gloucester, on the Stanley Park estate of his brother-in-law, Sir Samuel Stephens Marling, 1st Baronet. After the death of her husband Rimington’s mother lived at Stanley Hall with the Marling family, and when she died in 1878 she was also buried in All Saints churchyard.

Alexander Wallace Rimington, was the eldest of their three children; he attended Windlesham House School from 1864 to 1865 and Clifton College between January 1868 and December 1869. He studied art in Paris and London and became a pupil of landscape painter John Dearle. In 1884 Rimington married Charlotte Haig (1859-1913), born in Edinburgh, the daughter of Catherine Matilda and George Andrew Haig. The couple were married in the British Legation in Munich, Germany. Rimington had family links in Germany, his aunt, Eliza Rimington (1820-1894), had married Otto George Baron von Rosenberg of Dresden in 1854. Their daughter, Alice Harÿ Ottilie von Rosenberg (1865-1948), married Rimington's brother Frank (1856-1935) in 1891. Following the death of Charlotte in 1913, Rimington remarried to fellow watercolourist, Evelyn Jane Whyley (1870-1958).

Rimington took an interest in mechanical engineering: for a time he was a partner in a machinery agency based in the City of London and in 1875 he gave notice of a patent for a device to measure the delivery of liquids and solids,

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