Lowes Cato Dickinson | |
|---|---|
 Photo of Dickinson (published 1904) | |
| Born | 27 November 1819 |
| Died | 15 December 1908 (aged 89) Portland Place, London, England |
| Known for | Portrait painting |
Lowes Cato Dickinson (27 November 1819 – 15 December 1908) was an English portrait painter andChristian socialist. He taught drawing withJohn Ruskin andDante Gabriel Rossetti.[1] He was a founder of theWorking Men's College in London.[2]
Dickinson was born inKilburn, London and was one of eleven siblings. He obtained his first apprenticeship with his father, aBond Street lithographer and art publisher, after attending Topsham School, and Dr Lord's School in Tooting.[3] After his father's death in 1849, he became a partner with his two eldest brothers, Gilbert Bell Dickinson and William Robert Dickinson, in the firm of Dickinson Brothers of Bond Street. As well as continuing to publish lithographs, the firm were photographers, by appointment to Queen Victoria, and many of Dickinson's portraits were painted from photographs (when portraits were required of people too busy to sit for them, abroad, or dead). Dickinson frequently painted only the faces, with other artists hired to paint the clothes. Some of Dickinson's group pictures were also "subscription pictures", in which people would pay to have themselves portrayed more or less prominently in the painting.[4]
He corresponded and worked with the central participants of thePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,[7] lecturing with bothDante Gabriel Rossetti andJohn Ruskin.[1] He had a studio in the same building asJohn Everett Millais and taughtFord Madox Brown, who worked for a time at Dickinson Brothers. Before touringItaly for three years around 1850, he had exhibited at theRoyal Academy, at which he exhibited every year, except three, between 1848 and 1891.
With other Christian Socialists, Dickinson founded theWorking Men's College,London, in 1854,[8] a college to provide aliberal education for artisans. He was an enthusiastic follower of theChristian socialist movement, and painted other Christian Socialists includingCharles Kingsley,[9]Thomas Hughes,John Malcolm Forbes Ludlow,John Westlake,Frederick James Furnivall,Richard Buckley Litchfield,John Llewelyn Davies, and the movement's founder,F. D. Maurice.[8]
Other subjects for portraits includedQueen Victoria, thePrime Minister and his cabinet,George Eliot, and scientists such asArthur Cayley,William Thomson,Sir George Stokes andJames Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell mentions Dickinson in a poem he wrote to ridicule Cayley, where he notes that his portrait is merely in two dimensions whereas Cayley's achievements were in n-dimensional space.[10]
Dickinson married Margaret Ellen Williams in 1857. Their sons were writerGoldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and the accountant Arthur Lowes Dickinson;[11] they also had five daughters. He died in a house built for himself in All Souls Place just north of Oxford Circus, and was buried atKensal Green Cemetery. His papers are at Princeton,[1] Oxford and Cambridge Universities.[7]
Dickinson has numerous paintings in theNational Portrait Gallery in London, including his group painting ofGladstone's 1868 cabinet pictured in thecabinet room of10 Downing Street.[2] The Working Men's College offers an annual £1000 art prize for its students called the Lowes Dickinson Award.[12] His children also established a travel award for students in his memory.[3]
Macmillan, George Augustin (1912)."Dickinson, Lowes" . InLee, Sidney (ed.).Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Media related toLowes Cato Dickinson at Wikimedia Commons
