Maria Spilsbury
(1777 - 1823) |
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portraits, genre scenes, biblical subjects and large crowd compositions Art Work
| Name: |
Maria Spilsbury |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1777 |
| Death: |
1823 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
portraits, genre scenes, biblical subjects and large crowd compositions |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
In 1792, at the age of fifteen, Maria Spilsbury made her debut at the Royal Academy. Her father was an artist and engraver, and their careers are traced in Ruth Young's Father and Daughter: Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury (London 1952). Among the works she exhibited at the Academy were portraits and religious scenes. Her Christ Feeding the Multitude, shown in 1804, was admired by the Monthly Mirror critic: "The figures are very numerous, disposed in groups with great address, distinguished by the variety of action. This is Miss Spilsbury's
greatest performance.'
Spilsbury was celebrated above all as a genre painter in oils, and her success in this field can be understood as part of a contemporary taste for scenes of ordinary life. Developed from the art of the Netherlands, which had found favor in England with the Prince Regent (a keen patron of Spilsbury's work), genre painting also
reflected the rise of bourgeois society and popular taste. It was not only women who painted such scenes; but compositions filled with small-scale clothed figures are likely to have been more accessible to them at this time than the large-scale nudes and great events of history painting.
With her painting of a female teacher, Spilsbury was representing an area in which women worked (Mary Wollstonecraft briefly ran her own school in the 1780s). Opportunities had increased with the growth of charitable schools for the poor during the eighteenth century. Spilsbury was to have first-hand knowledge of this when she married the philanthropist John Taylor in 1810. Three years later they moved to Dublin where he helped to establish a school and she painted portraits and scenes of Irish life (including rural festivals, and John Wesley preaching to a crowd in the countryside), exhibiting her work at the Hibernian Society. |
Samples of Work
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