Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Fulleylove, John
FULLEYLOVE, JOHN (1845–1908), landscape painter, born at Leicester on 18 Aug. 1845, was son of John and Elizabeth Fulleylove. He was educated at day-schools in that town, and when about sixteen was articled as a clerk to Flint, Shenton and Baker, a local firm of architects. He developed a strong natural bent for the picturesque side of architecture by sketching from nature in his free hours, and received some instruction in painting from Harry Ward, a drawing-master of the school of Harding.
Fulleylove's earliest drawings were views of his native town and its neighbourhood. Taking up art professionally he began to exhibit English subjects in London in 1871. Subsequently he travelled widely at home and abroad in search of themes. In 1875 and again in 1880 he made tours in Italy. He spent the summer of 1878 in sketching at Tabley Old Hall, that of 1879 at Hampton Court, and that of 1882 at Versailles.
He was elected an associate of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in the spring of 1878, and became a member next year. Fulleylove moved from Leicester to London in 1883 and established himself at first in a house in Mecklenburgh Square, later moving (1893) to Great Russell Street, and ultimately (1894) to Church Row, Hampstead. Besides exhibiting an ever-widening range of subjects at the Institute, he held many exhibitions of his work at the Fine Art Society's galleries in Bond Street. Of these individual exhibitions, the first consisted of drawings of south-eastern France, 'Petrarch's Country' (1886); this was followed by views of Oxford (1888); views of Cambridge (1890); Parisian subjects and studies of Versailles (1894). In 1892 he exhibited a collection of local sketches at Leicester. In the summer of 1895 he visited Greece in company with his friends Alfred Higgins and Somers Clarke. Ninety drawings made during this tour, exhibited at the Fine Art Society's gallery in the following spring, mark the highest level of his achievement.
He occasionally practised painting in oil, was a member of the Institute of Painters in Oil, and contributed oil-paintings to the Academy and other exhibitions. In the summer of 1898 he executed a number of small panel pictures of Oxford which were exhibited at the Fine Art Society's Gallery in 1899. They were painted direct from nature, whereas the large oil pictures by which he was occasionally represented in later years at the Academy were worked up from water-colour sketches.
Fulleylove's next exhibition in Bond Street (1902) consisted of drawings of the Holy Land, but Palestine did not inspire him so happily as Greece. In 1904 many excellent pencil sketches were exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in London, and at Edinburgh a series of local views, which like most of his latest work, such as the drawings of Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and some Middlesex subjects (1907), were executed for reproduction in colour as illustrations to books. Some of his Oxford oil sketches and of his drawings of Greece and Palestine were reproduced in similar form. He himself preferred the black-and-white reproductions of his earlier (1888) Oxford sketches by lithography, and of the Greek drawings in photogravure.
His health failed suddenly, and he died at Hampstead on 22 May 1908. He was buried in Highgate cemetery. Fulleylove married, in 1878, Elizabeth Sara, daughter of Samuel Elgood of Leicester; she with one son and two daughters survived him. Fulleylove was an admirable architectural draughtsman. His early training had given him a thorough comprehension of construction and detail. His water-colour was always laid over a solid and carefully completed pencil sketch. In colour his earlier works are silvery, sometimes a little weak, but always harmonious. Greater breadth of tone and force of colour are noticeable in the Versailles drawings of 1893 and in the Greek series, which are not only his best productions but some of the most brilliant and accomplished water-colour work of his generation. A few of his drawings are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he is well represented in the Municipal Gallery at Leicester.
[Graves's Dictionary of Artists, 1760-1893; Catalogues of the Exhibitions of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and of the Fine Art Society; private information.]