John Linnell

John Linnell's career as a landscape and portrait painter lasted almost the entire nineteenth century. During its latter half he appears as England's most successful, certainly its wealthiest, landscape artist. But with the aesthetic fashions of the 1890s his reputation declined. Since then comparisons with William Blake, his early friend, and Samuel Palmer, his son-in-law, have outweighed consideration of Linnell's art on its own merits. This book catalogues a centennial exhibition of Linnell's paintings and drawings held in 1982–3, first at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and then at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. It is the first book devoted to Linnell since Story's biography Of 1893. Katharine Crouan has selected from his prolific output some of Linnell's best portraits and landscapes. These are fully illustrated, some in a section of colour plates. Miss Crouan introduces the hundred items with a biographical outline and an essay which estimates Linnell's place in British art. She explains how at different stages in his career he fused his religious and artistic principles, producing latterly a popularly understood, morality landscape'.