Glowing Embers

William Blacklock was born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, in North East England, in 1872. After leaving his family home he moved to London to study at The Royal College of Art. Here he met his wife Ellen and set up their marital home in Chelsea. In 1902 they moved to Edinburgh, where he attended the Edinburgh School of Art.

In 1906 on completion of his studies, he once again moved south to join an active artists’ colony at Walberswick in Suffolk. The colony had been founded by the artist Philip Wilson Steer, who gathered around him a circle of English Impressionists. Between 1908 and 1915 the Blacklocks lived at “The Barn” in Walberswick.

Blacklock was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy between 1897 and 1918, showing a total of seventeen works. He also regularly exhibited at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Blacklock was very much an artist of his time, born during the latter years of High Victorian painting, in style and content he drew on the traditional Victorian subject matter of rural and coastal everyday life. However, although suffused with an idealised view of nature and rural poverty, his work shows sometimes knowledge of the French Social Realists, such as Jean François Millet (1814-1875) and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), but interpreted in a fashion more akin to that of Leon L’Hermitte (1844-1925), the renowned painter of rural France.