John Trivett Nettleship

John Trivett Nettleship (11 February 1841 – 31 August 1902) was an English artist, known as a painter of animals and in particular lions. He was also an author and book illustrator.

He was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire on 11 February 1841, the second son of Henry John Nettleship, a solicitor there, and brother of Henry Nettleship, Richard Lewis Nettleship, and of Edward Nettleship, the ophthalmic surgeon. His mother was Isabella Ann, daughter of James Hogg, vicar of Geddington and Master of Kettering Grammar School.

Nettleship was for some time a chorister at New College, Oxford. Afterwards he was sent to the cathedral school at Durham, where his brother Henry had preceded him. Having won the English verse prize on the subject of "Venice" in 1856, he was taken away comparatively young, in order to enter his father's office. There he remained for two or three years, finishing his articles in London. Admitted a solicitor and in practice for a brief period, he decided to devote himself to art, and entered himself as a student at Heatherley's and at the Slade School in London, but was largely self-taught.

For twenty-seven years (1874–1901) he exhibited spacious oil pictures of lions, tigers, etc., at the Royal Academy and for most of the period at the Grosvenor Gallery. In 1880 Nettleship was invited to India by the Gaekwar of Baroda, for whom he painted a cheetah hunt as well as an equestrian portrait. In his later years he took to the medium of pastel, and, painting his old subjects on a smaller scale, enjoyed greater popularity.

Nettleship was far more than a painter. His intellectual sympathies were unusually wide. In 1868, when only twenty-seven, he published a volume of Essays on Robert Browning's Poetry, which was probably the first serious study of the poet. It passed through three editions with considerable enlargements. The third edition was titled Robert Browning: Essays and Thoughts (1895). The book brought about an intimate friendship between the poet and his critic. Another book that shows both his mature power of literary expression and his opinions about his own art is George Morland and the Evolution from him of some Later Painters (1898). Here there are touches of self-portraiture.

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