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Francis Wheatley

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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FRANCIS WHEATLEY (1747-1801), English .portrait and landscape painter, was born in 1747 at Wild Court, Covent Garden, London. He studied at Shipley's drawing-school and the Royal Academy, and won several prizes from the Society of Arts. He assisted in the decoration of Vauxhall, and aided Mortimer in painting a ceiling for Lord Melbourne at Brocket Hall (Hertfordshire). In youth his life was irregular and dissipated. He eloped to Ireland with the wife of Gresse, a brother artist, and established himself in Dublin as a portrait-painter, executing, among other works, an interior of the Irish House of Commons. His scene from the London Riots of 1780 was admirably engraved by Heath. He painted several subjects for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, designed illustrations to Bell's edition of the poets, and practised to some small extent as an etcher and mezzotint-engraver. It is, however, as a painter, in both oil and water-colour, of landscapes and rustic subjects that Wheatley is best remembered. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1790, and an academician in the following year. He died on the 28th of June 1801. His wife, afterwards Mrs Pope, was known as a painter of flowers and portraits.