1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Creswick, Thomas

CRESWICK, THOMAS (1811–1869), English landscape-painter, was born at Sheffield, and educated at Hazelwood, near Birmingham. At Birmingham he first began to paint. His earliest appearance as an exhibitor was in 1827, at the Society of British Artists in London; in the ensuing year he sent to the Royal Academy the two pictures named “Llyn Gwynant, Morning,” and “Carnarvon Castle.” About the same time he settled in London; and in 1836 he took a house in Bayswater. He soon attracted some attention as a landscape-painter, and had a career of uniform and encouraging, though not signal success. In 1842 he was elected an associate, and in 1850 a full member of the Royal Academy, which, for several years before his death, numbered hardly any other full members representing this branch of art. In his early practice he set an example, then too much needed, of diligent study of nature out of doors, painting on the spot all the substantial part of several of his pictures. English and Welsh streams may be said to have formed his favourite subjects, and generally British rural scenery, mostly under its cheerful, calm and pleasurable aspects, in open daylight. This he rendered with elegant and equable skill, colour rather grey in tint, especially in his later years, and more than average technical accomplishment; his works have little to excite, but would, in most conditions of public taste, retain their power to attract. Creswick was industrious and extremely prolific; he produced, besides a steady outpouring of paintings, numerous illustrations for books. He was personally genial—a dark, bulky man, somewhat heavy and graceless in aspect in his later years. He died at his house in Bayswater, Linden Grove, on the 28th of December 1869, after a few years of declining health. Among his principal works may be named “England” (1847); “Home by the Sands, and a Squally Day” (1848); “Passing Showers” (1849); “The Wind on Shore, a First Glimpse of the Sea, and Old Trees” (1850); “A Mountain Lake, Moonrise” (1852); “Changeable Weather” (1865); also the “London Road, a Hundred Years ago”; “The Weald of Kent”; the “Valley Mill” (a Cornish subject); a “Shady Glen”; the “Windings of a River”; the “Shade of the Beech Trees”; the “Course of the Greta”; the “Wharfe”; “Glendalough,” and other Irish subjects, 1836 to 1840; the “Forest Farm.” Frith for figures, and Ansdell for animals, occasionally worked in collaboration with Creswick.

In 1873 T. O. Barlow, the engraver, published a catalogue of Creswick’s works.