Barnes School (painters)

The Williams family of painters, also known as the Barnes School, is a family of prominent 19th-century Victorian landscape artists known for their paintings of the British countryside, coasts and mountains. They are represented by the artist Edward Williams (1781–1855), his six sons, and several grandchildren.

Edward Williams (1781–1855), the patriarch of the Williams family of painters and founder of the Barnes School of artists, was a successful landscape artist, who became very popular during the Victorian era for painting moonlit scenes of the English countryside. He was followed as a landscape artist by his six sons and several of his many grandchildren. Over the years, this artist family became known as the Barnes School, so called because from 1846 until about the turn of the century, Williams, several of his sons, and some of his grandchildren worked out of neighboring studios in the then rural setting of Barnes, London, on the south side of the Thames River.

The Williams family was probably first referred to as a school by the Athenaeum magazine, whose July 14, 1855 obituary for Edward Williams wrote that, "[he] trained what must almost be called a school of landscape painters in his sons . . . whose works . . . do credit to him who trained them." This same journal in 1886, and subsequently the Dictionary of National Biography, wrote that Williams' son Sidney Richard Percy was "founder of the so-called School of Barnes". Nonetheless, the role of Edward Williams as patriarch and mentor of Percy and his brothers is undeniable. Percy specialized in painting landscape scenes with cattle, and if the description "Barnes School" implies just this style of landscape, then certainly it is Percy who developed that theme to a greater degree than any in his family. However, if the Barnes School implies a style employed by the family as a whole wherein the natural setting of the landscape, not the figures in it, sets the mood for the painting, then Percy's father Edward Williams must be considered the founder of the Barnes School.

Paintings of the Williams family are characterized by farm and village settings, cloudy mountain vistas, boats plying marshes along the Thames, and cattle grazing in meadow wetlands, usually painted in soft earth tones and subtle greens, and often displaying a complex interplay of light and shadow. Edward Williams was a master at creating scenes with complex lighting in which the figures, often people and boats, were subordinate to the scenery, in an age when landscape painters were considered subordinate to figure painters. His sons developed this style further, each adding their own variations. Their paintings were extremely popular in Victorian England and remain so today. Examples of the work of Edward Williams and all six of his sons, as well as several of his grandchildren hang today in prominent museums, and some Williams family paintings, especially those of Henry John Boddington and Sidney Richard Percy, command impressive prices at auction.

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