Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dodgson, George Haydock
DODGSON, GEORGE HAYDOCK (1811–1880), water-colour painter, was born at Liverpool, 16 Aug. 1811. After receiving the usual middle-class education he was apprenticed to George Stephenson, the celebrated engineer, who employed him in surveying and drawing up specifications. Among other work he prepared the plans for the Whitby and Pickering railway. In 1836 appeared ‘Illustrations of the Scenery on the Line of the Whitby and Pickering Railway,’ from drawings made by him, and engraved by J. T. Willmore, Challis, Stephenson, and others. Before long his health gave way, and he gratified his youthful ambition by abandoning the desk for the easel. Removing to London about 1835, he turned to account his architectural knowledge in making picturesque drawings for several eminent architects. One of these, a ‘Tribute to the Memory of Sir Christopher Wren,’ being a group of Wren's principal works arranged by Charles Robert Cockerell, R.A., was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838, and afterwards engraved. He also made drawings on wood for the ‘Illustrated London News’ and other publications. His love for the beauties of nature, however, led him by degrees to devote his whole attention to landscape-painting, and in 1842 he was elected an associate of the New Society of Painters in Water-colours, of which he became a full member in 1844; but this position he resigned in 1847, in order that he might be eligible for the older Society of Painters in Water-colours, of which he was elected an associate in 1848, and a full member in 1852. He was never out of England, and returned again and again to paint at Whitby and Richmond in Yorkshire; Gower Swansea, and the Mumbles in South Wales, the Lake district, Haddon Hall, Knole, and the Thames. Beech trees were objects of great attraction to him, and a special favourite at Knole was known as ‘Dodgson's Beech.’ He exhibited occasionally at the Royal Academy between 1838 and 1850, and sent a few drawings to the British Institution and Society of British Artists. He died in London on 4 June 1880. There are two drawings by Dodgson in the South Kensington Museum, an ‘Interior of a Cathedral’ and ‘Solitude,’ a scene in Newgate Street, with a figure of a tired-out tramp crouching on the pavement.
[Athenæum, 1880, i. 831; Art Journal, 1880, p. 300; Catalogues of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1838–50; Catalogues of the Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-colours, 1848–80; Catalogues of the Exhibition of the New Society of Painters in Water-colours, 1842–1847.]