George Vincent (baptised 27 June 17961832) was an English landscape painter who produced watercolours, etchings and oil paintings. He is considered by art historians to be one of the most talented of the Norwich School of painters, a group of artists inspired by the Norfolk countryside. Vincent's work was founded on the Dutch school of landscape painting as well as the style of John Crome, also of the Norwich School. The school's reputation outside East Anglia in the 1820s was based largely upon the works of Vincent and his friend James Stark.
The son of a weaver, Vincent was educated at Norwich Grammar School and afterwards apprenticed to Crome. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, British Institution, and elsewhere. From 1811 until 1831 he showed at the Norwich Society of Artists, exhibiting more than 100 pictures of Norfolk landscapes and marine works. By 1818 he had relocated to London, where in 1821 he married the supposedly wealthy daughter of a surgeon. There he obtained the patronage of wealthy clients, yet struggled financially. The purchase of an expensive house, combined with a tendency towards drink, exacerbated his financial problems and led to his incarceration in the Fleet Prison for debt in 1824. Before his release in 1827 he had resumed his connection with the Norwich Society of Artists, albeit with a much lower output of work.
After 1831, Vincent disappeared. He was never found, despite attempts by his family to locate him, and his whereabouts after this date remain uncertain. His death may have occurred before April 1832, perhaps in Bath. His picture Greenwich Hospital from the River, which was shown in London three decades after his death, caused renewed interest in his paintings and helped to establish his reputation as a leading member of the Norwich School. The art historian Herbert Minton Cundall wrote in the 1920s that had Vincent "not given way to intemperate habits he would probably have ranked amongst the foremost of British landscape painters".
Background
The Norwich School of painters was a regional school of landscape painters connected personally or professionally. Though mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside, many also depicted other landscapes and coastal and urban scenes. The school's most important members were John Crome and John Sell Cotman—the leading spirits and finest artists of the movement—as well as Vincent, James Stark, Joseph Stannard, Robert Ladbrooke and Edward Thomas Daniell, the best etcher of the school.
It was a unique phenomenon in the history of 19th-century British art; Norwich produced more successful artists than any other similar city in England, and its theatrical, artistic, philosophical and musical cultures were cross-fertilised in a way that was unique outside the capital. Originally regarded as modern and progressive, the movement was by the end of the 19th century seen as belonging to a bygone age, due to what the art historian Andrew Hemingway describes as the "mythology of rural Englishness" that prevailed.
The Norwich Society of Artists was founded by Crome and Ladbrooke in 1803. It arose from a sense of collective identity (but not a common style) that emerged among the many artists supported by Norwich patrons. They influenced each other by forming evening meetings, sketching together, and exhibiting their works; Crome and Ladbrooke took on apprentices, whilst others taught amateurs, all of whom tended to imitate the style of their teachers. It was created "". It held regular exhibitions and had an organised structure, showing works annually until 1825 and again from 1828 until it was dissolved in 1833. Almost every professional artist in Norwich exhibited with the Society, but not all of the members of the Norwich School belonged to it.
At the end of the 17th century, other schools of painting had begun to form, associated with artists such as Francis Towne at Exeter and John Malchair at Oxford. Other centres of population outside London were creating art societies, whose painters and drawing masters influenced their pupils. Unlike those of the Norwich School, these artists did not benefit from wealthy merchants and landed gentry demonstrating their patriotism by acquiring picturesque paintings of the English countryside. The Norwich Society of Artists, the first group of its kind to be created since the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768, was remarkable in acting in its members' interests for 30 yearsa longer period than for any other similar group.
After the dissolution of the Norwich Society of Artists in 1833, and Cotman's death in 1842, no professional artists of a similar calibre remained in Norwich. Interest in the school fell off during the 1830s, until their reputation re-emerged after the Royal Academy's 1878 Winter Exhibition.
Life Family and education
George Vincent, the eldest surviving son of James Vincent and his first wife Mary Freeman, was baptised on 27 June 1796, at St John the Baptist's Church, Timberhill. Two years earlier, his older brother—also named George—had died in infancy; a brother named James, who survived to adulthood, is recorded. His mother died around 1800. His father was a worsted weaver who manufactured shawls. On his mother's side, George was a cousin of William Jackson Hooker, who became the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1841. Vincent lived with his family in a house on St. Clement's Church Alley, close to the River Wensum, remaining there until he moved away from Norwich in around 1818.
Vincent was educated at Norwich Grammar School, where he became good friends with John Berney Crome and his brother Frederick, and formed a life-long friendship with James Stark, whose father Michael Stark, a dye manufacturer, would have known Vincent's father through his business connections. He enjoyed drawing with charcoal at an early age.
John Crome, who was the best-known drawing-master in Norwich, had with the help of his friends been secured a post at the Grammar School as a drawing master, and would have taught Vincent and his classmates; the post, although likely to have been part-time, was nevertheless his most important teaching activity. Known as "Old Crome" at the school, he was a great favourite with the boys, who greatly enjoyed tricking their teacher into completing their drawings, or more often than not producing a new work of his own. He would paint with extraordinary rapidity, quite forgetting how time was passing, and "with the boys looking on at him admiring his artistic skill".
Early adulthood (1812–1821)
On leaving school, George Vincent, John Berney Crome and James Stark were apprenticed to John Crome, perhaps as early as 1812. Vincent's first exhibited works, two of which were described as "after Crome", were shown at Sir Benjamin Wrench's Court in 1811 and 1812. The three friends, of whom Vincent was the most talented, travelled together on sketching and painting trips, influencing each other's artistic styles in the process. In January 1816 Vincent travelled to France and the Netherlands with John Berney Crome and Benjamin Steel, a surgeon who was to marry John Berney's sister Hannah six years later. In a letter written by John Crome, Vincent was reported to be seasick during the crossing to France. Rouen, now in the Norfolk Museums Collections, is the only painting produced from this visit. It was followed by a tour of Essex, during which time he painted works depicting the villages of Ingatestone and Little Baddow, and in 1816 he and Stark exhibited views of Windsor after touring the area. In around 1818 he left his family home on St. Clement's Church Alley and moved to London, residing first at 7 Wells Street, and then at 86 Newman Street, next door to Stark. Nearly every house on Newman Street was occupied by working artists; according to the Survey of London: South-East Marylebone, "by the time a Newman Street address had become a step on the road to fame, the really famous had moved out". Vincent lived there until 1821.
The most important place in London for studying Old Masters was at the British Institution; Vincent and Stark both studied there after they enrolled at the Institute's school in 1817. The artists they studied probably included Aelbert Cuyp, Jan Dirksz Both, Meindert Hobbema, Aert van der Neer and Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem. They would have been influenced by other collections in the capital, as well as pictures on display at auction houses, and works shown in exhibitions. Almost all the pictures at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, including those by Cuyp, Philips Wouwerman, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, could be viewed after it opened to the public in 1817, and students such as Vincent and Stark were encouraged by the college to study and copy its collection. After two years Stark was forced to return home to Norwich due to ill health.
In 1819 Vincent toured Scotland, which resulted in paintings such as View of Edinburgh from Calton Hill and Fishing Boats on the Bank of the Forth—the quality of which, according to Day, shows how the artist was at the height of his powers during this period. The following year he exhibited at the Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours his London from the Surrey Side of Waterloo Bridge, considered by the author William Frederick Dickes to be an important work. It was purchased by John Leicester, 1st Baron de Tabley and shown to the public in his London gallery before being relocated to his collection at Tabley House, Cheshire.
Marriage and subsequent decline
Vincent and Stark travelled from Norfolk to London to attend John Crome's funeral in 1821. At this time Vincent was ill, although the reason for his poor health is not given by any sources or mentioned in his published letters. The art historian Josephine Walpole considers that his misfortunes began once he was left without his old teacher to act as a steadying influence.
On 3 November 1821 he married 19-year-old Mary Elizabeth Cugnoni, the only daughter of the physician James Cugnoni, who was, according to Stark, extremely wealthy. The event was recorded in the Norfolk Chronicle a week later. No children are known to have been produced from the marriage. Vincent bought a house in Camden Town that was more than his own income could afford; it was sold when, for reasons that have never been explained, his wife's money failed to materialise. By the summer of 1824 he and his wife were living at 26 Upper Thornhaugh Street, close to Bedford Square, a more affordable house closer to the centre of London.
Vincent's health deteriorated and his debts mounted, in part because of his drinking habits. In a letter dated 27 July 1824 to his friend William Davey, he referred to a "past folly", which seems to have been the cause of a permanent rift between Vincent and his Norwich friends, as well as with his father, already troubled by his intemperance. His letters to Davey reveal his financial problems and include a reference to the "infamy" he felt was levelled at him. No details have emerged about the nature of the 'folly' mentioned in the letter; Walpole suggests Vincent's intemperance contributed to the 'folly', and mentions "strange and unpleasant rumours" about Vincent that were circulating, whilst the art historian Campbell Dodgson presumed that his debts were the cause. In a letter written in October that year to Davey, Vincent wrote, "To me it has beenand likewise to my better halfa great source of pleasure to wander over the scenes of former days." To the author Harold Day, this implied that he was happily married at this time. By now Davey was having to help his friend sell works in Norwich at lower than expected prices.