Hubert
von Herkomer was born in Germany in 1849.
Hubert's family to England and in 1857 settled in Southampton.
Herkomer studied at Southampton School of Art, the Munich Academy
and the South Kensington Art School, where like his fellow student
Luke Fildes, he was influenced by the work
of Frederick Walker.
Herkomer left Kensington Art School and 1867 and started a career
as a book and magazine illustrator. Herkomer found most of the work
fairly boring but as a young man with radical political opinions he
was excited by the news that the social reformer, William
Luson Thomas, planned to publish an illustrated weekly magazine
called the Graphic magazine. Herkomer
sent Thomas a drawing of a group of gypsies. Thomas accepted the picture
and the following week it appeared in the Graphic.
Herkomer was paid £8 for the picture and Thomas urged him to
send more.
Over the next few years Herkomer had a large number of his drawings
published in the Graphic. However,
unlike his two friends, Luke Fildes and
Frank Holl, Herkomer was not offered a full-time
post on the magazine. Where as staff members were commissioned, free-lance
artists such as Herkomer had to find his own subject matter. Although
Herkomer was angry when William Luson Thomas told him he was unwilling
to employ him as a staff member of the Graphic,
he later admitted: "In my heart I bitterly resented these words,
but they were the words I needed: they were the making of me as an
artist.".
Several of Herkomer's engravings that appeared in the Graphic were
later reworked as large-scale oil paintings. This included, The
Last Muster (1875) and Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster
Union (1878). The Last Muster had originally been used
by the Graphic to show a group of
old army veterans attending a church service. As a painting it was
seven feet long and was sold to a photographic firm for £1,200.
In
1880s Hubert von Herkomer concentrated on the financially lucrative
area of portraiture. He visited the USA and during a period of ten
weeks received £6,600 for thirteen portraits. Herkomer's income
was now higher than many of the rich people he painted and was now
able to live a life of luxury. Although he received large sums of
money for his portraits, Herkomer continued to produce social realist
paintings. This included the Pressing to the West (1884), Hard
Times (1885) and On Strike (1891).
Herkomer opened his own art school and during the period 1883 and
1904, trained over 500 students. Herkomer also served as Slade Professor
of Art between 1885 and 1895. Hubert von Herkomer, who was knighted
in 1907, died in 1914.
Hubert
von Herkomer, Westminster Union, The
Graphic (7th April, 1877)
(1)
On the death of William Luson Thomas, Hubert
von Herkomer wrote an account of the importance of the Graphic to
social realist artists.
It is not too much to say that there was a visible change in the selection
of subjects by painters in England after the advent of The Graphic.
Mr. Thomas opened its pages to every phase of the story of our life;
he led the rising artist into drawing subjects that might never have
otherwise arrested his attention; he only asked that they should be
subjects of universal interest and of artistic value. I owe to Mr.
Thomas everything in my early art career. Whether it was to do a twopenny
lodging-house for women in St. Giles', a scene in Petticoat Lane,
Sunday morning, the flogging of a criminal in Newgate Prison, an entertainment
given to Italian organ grinders, it mattered little. It was a lesson
in life, and a lesson in art. I am only one of many who received these
lessons at the hands of Mr. W. L. Thomas.
(2)
Hubert von Herkomer, wrote a letter to a friend while in the USA (1882)
I have three sitters every day. It seems like a dream that I can with
my own honest handiwork make so much. In the two and a half months
I shall have done thirteen portraits for money. These thirteen portraits
bring me six thousand six hundred and fourteen pounds sterling. I
have already paid into my bank this year five thousand pounds, so
I shall have in the nine months of this year over eleven thousand.
Everybody wants to be painted now. Whenever I come to Boston again
a clear year's work is ready for me. This is not a wild speculation
but a reality.
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