Walter Withers

Walter Herbert Withers ( born October 22, 1854 in Aston Manor, England; † October 13, 1914 in Eltham, Australia) was an Australian landscape artist and a member of the Heidelberg School, the Australian Impressionists.

Life and work

Withers was born in Warwickshire in Birmingham today as one of fourteen children. He showed an early desire to painting, while his father Edwin Withers, however, was reluctant. It is unknown which employment he pursued in England. However, his father did not know that he is a professional painter.

In 1882 he came to Australia with the intention to work on a farm. After working for about 18 months on a farm, located Withers opened to Melbourne and took up a job there as a draftsman in a printing company. There he made ​​with chalk portraits in black and white for various magazines. In his spare time, Withers tried to cultivate his art. Finally, it was one of his works for an exhibition in the Old Academy, Melbourne, accepted. In this time he met Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and Louis Abraham, with whom he remained lifelong friends.

1887 Withers went to Europe. On October 11, 1887, he married Fanny Flinn in Handsworth -with- Soho, Staffordshire. The couple settled in a small apartment in Paris. For a few months he studied at the Académie Julian.

Since the order was issued in to do black and white work for Fergusson & Mitchell from Melbourne, he and his wife in June 1888 returned to Australia. His most famous work of this kind can be found in the illustrations to Edmund Finn's The Chronicles of Early Melbourne.

First, Withers settled in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, then in Eaglemont on the other side of the Yarra River. He began to sell a few pictures, but the Depression of the 1890s put an end to his illustrative work.

Influence

Withers influence on younger students as a painter of his time was remarkable. He referred several places as teacher of drawing and painting in schools. Among his pupils were Percy Lindsay and his younger brother Norman Lindsay.

In 1891 he opened a studio in Melbourne, where he also held his first private exhibition. From 1894 Withers spent four years in a country house in Cape Street, Heidelberg. There, some of his best works, the fin-de- siècle emerged. In 1894, his masterpiece, Tranquil Winter, shown in an exhibition of the Victorian Artists' Society and purchased by the curators of the National Gallery of Victoria. The Selector 's Home (1895 ), was a success, which attracted the admiration of Arthur Streeton and Fred McCubbin up.

Withers settled down after a steady career as a painter, though not commercially successful from the beginning. In 1897 he received the first Wynne Prize in Sydney for his work The Storm, which was purchased in the same year by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1889 he was elected to the Council of the Victorian Artists' Society, and in 1905 held its Präsidententamt for a year. Towards the end of his life his health deteriorated, but he completed a number of works, both oil as well as watercolor paintings.

In 1914, he died in Eltham, Victoria, and left behind his wife and four children.