Frederick William Lock (artist)

Frederick William Lock
Frederick W. Lock, self-portrait, M672 Frederick W. Lock, 1858, Pastel, crayon McCord Museum, Montreal
Born	c. 1823 England
Died	date unknown place unknown
Occupation	Painter- Portraits, Landscapes
Spouse(s)	Emily Chaffey (first) unknown (second)
Children	unknown
Parent(s)	Mother's maiden name: Isaacson

Frederick W. Lock, 1858, Pastel, crayon

Emily Chaffey (first)

Frederick William Lock (active 1841-1863) is known primarily as a Canadian painter of portraits and landscapes. His medium was predominately pastel chalk crayon on paper. Many of Lock's pastel portraits were executed on “dark paper” so that the subject’s faces often came out relatively dark-skinned, an unusual technique. A few of his landscapes were lithographed, notably of Niagara Falls and of The Thousand Islands, while others were in pencil, ink and in watercolor. Citations of Lock and his artwork are found in Early Printers and Engravers in Canada by J. Russel Harper, and in The Collector's Dictionary of Canadian Artists at Auction by Anthony R. Westbridge and Diana L. Bodnar.

F. W. Lock's works can be found in the British Museum, The National Gallery, and National Portrait Gallery, London, England; the McCord Museum, National Gallery of Canada, National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, Montreal, QC; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario; the Brockville Museum, Brockville, Ontario; the Brome County Historical Society Museum, Knowlton, Quebec, Canada; and the Harvard/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Lock is believed to have been born in England, likely about 1823 [date and place needed here]. As a youth he was enrolled at the National Gallery, London, in 1841 as a copyist (#1072) by William Seguier, the first Keeper of the National Gallery. One of Lock's copyist paintings while at the National Gallery (c. 1841), is his rendering of a 17th Century Bearded Gentleman with a Ruff, a copy of the Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest, by Anthony Van Dyck.

Lock worked for a time in England as a lithographer. An 1841 mezzotint proof print of Lock's drawing of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert returning from their wedding ceremony, engraved by Samuel William Reynolds, Jr., is in the British Museum collection (Accessed 2015-12-18). That drawing by Lock was later reformatted and published in 1844 by John William Laird, bearing the title The Bridal Morn (Queen Victoria; Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) is in The National Portrait Gallery collection, London, (Accessed 2016-02-17). Another of Lock's drawings, a portrait entitled The Fair Domino, engraved and printed by T. W. Huffman in 1844, is also in the British Museum collection (Accessed 2015-12-18).