Joseph Francis Gilbert

Joseph Francis Gilbert was born in Chichester, Sussex, in December 1791, the son of a watch- and precision-instrument maker. The details of his instruction as a painter are unknown, but there is a clear debt in his painting style to the works of the earlier painters George and William Smith of Chichester (to whom the present painting was at one time erroneously attributed) and William Pether, who were all landscape painters working in Chichester. He began exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Society of Artists from 1813. His work essentially continues the Georgian romantic topographic tradition, with an emphasis on the "sublime" and "picturesque". Towards the end of his career, his style became rather more "homely" and early Victorian. His output was largely curtailed by a paralytic stroke in 1850, though he did not die until 1855. He is buried in St. Bartholomew's Church in Chichester.

1 ITEM