Richard Evans (portrait painter)

Richard Evans (1784–1871), was an English portrait-painter and copyist, a pupil and later assistant of Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Evans was born in Shrewsbury. When young he was a close friend of the Birmingham-born artist David Cox, who would lend ink landscape drawings to Evans, who was short of money, so that he could make copies to sell. When Cox moved to London in 1804, Evans and another aspiring artist friend, Charles Barber, followed him there. They both took lodgings near Cox, and all three would go out sketching together.

For some years Evans was a pupil and assistant of Sir Thomas Lawrence, for whom he painted drapery and backgrounds and made replicas of his paintings. When Lawrence died in 1830, he left a large number of unfinished paintings, and Evans completed or copied several portraits of George IV and completed a portrait of the Bishop of Durham for the painter's executors.

Thomas Campbell, who was at once stage considering a biography of Lawrence said in a letter that no-one knew more about Lawrence than Evans, due to his exceptional memory, and his having lived in his master's house for six years. Evans promised to help Campbell with his book when time allowed, but when Campbell asked for assistance again, after a long delay, he found out that Evans had already told his stock of anecdotes to his friend Watts, editor of the "Annual Obituary" to use in his publication. Campbell shelved his plan for lack of fresh material.

In 1814 Evans visited the Louvre in Paris, and was one of the first Englishmen to copy the pictures there. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1816, showing a portrait of the aeronaut James Sadler.

In the same year he went to Haiti where he became head of the new school of drawing and painting set up by King Henri Christophe at his palace of Sans-Souci. He arrived on Haiti on 21 September, in the company of Prince Saunders, and three other men Saunders had engaged in England: an agriculturalist and two schoolmasters. He painted portraits of the Haitian royal family, his first portrait of the king being sent as a gift to William Wilberforce. In 1818 Evans exhibited pictures catalogued as His Majesty Henry Christophe, King of Hayti and Prince Victor Henry, Prince Royal of Hayti at the Royal Academy.

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