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E REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THE DEATH, WHICH TOOK PLACE YESTERDAY, OF MR BRITON RIVIERE RA.
Mr Riviere came from a family of French origin which had settled in England since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The last four generations of the family, moreover, having been connected with the Royal Academy, his grandfather having been a student and medallist, his father a student, himself an Academician, and his son Mr Hugh Riviere a constant exhibitor and medallist. Mr William Riviere’s selection of his son’s Christian name, and the son’s protests, not always successful against those who Gallicised his name with an accent are thus intelligible.
He was born in London on August 14th 1840, the youngest child of William Riviere, his mother being a daughter of Mr Joseph Jarvis whom the father had married in 1830. At the age of eight he was taken to Cheltenham by his father, who had been appointed drawing master at the recently founded college. In due course he entered the college, and had the benefit of his fathers tuition. His artistic bent was shown at an early age. A remarkable drawing of a wolf’s head, made at the Zoological Gardens when he was seven, is extant; before he was twelve he exhibited two pictures at the British Institution; in 1857, before he went to Oxford, three of his pictures were accepted at the Royal Academy. The restricted scale of the drawing school at Cheltenham, the unwillingness of the directors to meet his suggestions for its enlargement induced Riviere senior to settle in Oxford in 1858. Here he entered into the artistic life of the University, making many friends. From Goldwin Smith his son received a commission of some historic interest. When the Prince of Wales (the future Edward V11), left Oxford in 1860, he left cheques to Regius Professors whose lectures he had attended. Goldwin Smith determined to spend his fee on a picture by Briton Riviere, who painted for him his Death of Marmion, which is now in a public collection in the United States.
Riviere matriculated at St Mary Hall, but attended no lectures, and applied himself mainly to the study of art, living in his father’s house in Beaumont-street. He did, however, read with private tutors, among others with the Reverend T P G Tiddemans, Rector of Hincksey, and with the late George Waring, whom Thorold Rogers used to call "The most learned man in Europe," and to whose conversation he owed something of the wide culture which marked him in afterlife. He took his first degree in 1867 and proceeded to his MA six years later. Under the influence of his brother-in-law Mr Clarence Dobell, Fed Walker, and Millais he was fascinated at this period by the Pre-Raphaelite theories, and painted Elaine in the Barge, and other pictures on the new principles. Their rejection by the Royal Academy may have weakened his allegiance to the Brotherhood, and in 1863 he returned to orthodoxy with Drake and the British Admirals playing bowls before going out to meet the Armada, and two years later he exhibited the Sleeping Deerhound, the first of a long series of animal pictures which form his distinctive work. Riviere now entered a period of untiring industry, spending his days in painting, and his evenings drawing illustrations for Punch, Good Words, and book illustration. It is probable that working by artificial light led to a weakness of the eyes, which in his later years prevented him from working more than an hour or two a day. His work for Punch was done between 1868 and 1871, and consisted mainly of elaborate initials, one of which formed the basis for his picture Of a fool and his folly there is no end, exhibited at the Royal Academy twenty years later.
SUCCESSFUL YEARS
It was in those years, or perhaps we may say in the years from 1866 to 1871, that Riviere definitely established his position as a painter, and emerged from obscurity into the full light of fame. To begin with, there were such pictures as The Empty Chair, and The Last of the Garrison, the former a mourning deerhound in surroundings originally sketched from, an old staircase in Merton College. Several good pictures too, were sent to the Dudley Gallery, which in those pre-Grosvenor days had the best of outside, exhibitions. Then in 1870, Mr Riviere made his first real hit with the picture called Charity, a beggar girl sharing her crust with two dogs as poor and lean as herself. The picture instantly proved that the country possessed an animal painter of a different calibre from the Andsells, and Nobles and others, who were then following Landseer longo intervallo, and not technically inferior to Landseer himself, but quite different. In point of fact as Sir William Armstrong has pointed out (doubtless on Mr Riviere’s authority), the man of the older generation he followed in technique was not Landseer but James Ward. Where Riviere touched Landseer was in the emotional side of his work; in the tendency to dwell on the points of sympathy between animals and human beings, and to find in animals almost as many ways of expressing them as are found in man. Charity was a successful step in this direction, but Riviere’s first real triumph came next year with the celebrated picture Circe. The Goddess herself, indeed, was a rather Anglo-Greek rather than the aesthetic of the type the prevalent in London; but the pigs with their infinite suggestion of human and humorous personality, appeal to everyone, and both the picture itself and Mr Stackpole’s clever engraving of it had a prodigious success. Still finer was the Daniel, which followed in 1872, a picture which made a great impression , both as an illustration of character and a work of art. The figure of the young Prophet, and the shrinking respect shown by the lions delighted the many, while artists admired the extreme ingenuity of the composition and line as studies of form. From this time forward Riviere was an established favourite, and there followed a long succession of pictures, which the public went to see and wealthy men bought and the engravers translated into black and white. Of these it is only necessary to mention a few, such as Sympathy, of 1878, Persephone, and the amusing Anxious Moment, all three the work of one fruitful year. Acteon, 1884, Rizpah, 1886 and Adonis Wounded, 1888. He continued to paint animal subjects, or subjects in which animals play the leading part, for many years more; but latterly his eyes began to trouble him, and he came to prefer themes and methods which troubled him less. A really excellent shore scene at the exhibition of 1906 showed he could rival the modern landscape painters on their own ground. He also painted some portraits generally including a dog; but here, as with Landseer, the dog was always better than the man.
At the election for the President of the Royal Academy of 1896 Poynter achieved a small majority over Riviere; but if the voting had gone otherwise it is doubtful that the honour would have been wholly a source of pleasure to the recipient. His seclusion may be partly attributable to the indifferent health of his later years; but he was of a retiring nature, and although his many friends were attracted by his simplicity and charm of manner, he shrank from publicity in any form, and his personality was little known to the general public.
In 1867 Mr Riviere married Mary Alice, daughter of Mr John Dobell of Detmore. Mrs Riviere was thus a sister of Sydney Dobell the poet who died in 1874. She survives her husband, who also leaves a family of five sons and two daughters. The funeral will take place at St James’s Piccadilly at 1030 am on Tuesday.
This year Mr Riviere sends four pictures to the Academy, one of which Dead Hector, will be found on another page. Mr Riviere’s studio, one of our representatives says "is a large room, square and lofty, one end of it hung with tapestry, the floor highly polished, with a couch or two here and there, a platform a couple of cabinets and many portfolios; but the object on which my eyes rested was the skeleton of a leopard." The skeleton suggested a few questions which were addressed to Mr Riviere concerning his models. Of course Mr Riviere goes to the Zoo for his wild animals, and that is where much of his hard work is done. And it IS hard work getting up to the gardens at seven or eight in the morning and waiting for animals to assume some particular pose which discovers the action of some particular muscle which is necessary for your picture. Mr Riviere’s studies are wonderfully graphic charcoal sketches, which he records almost with the rapidity of a camera. It may be an eye, it may be a paw, a mane, a toe, or a tail-Mr Riviere notes them all down: or the study may be a most vigorous full-length portrait of a lion or lioness, which is taken back to the studio after two or three hours work in the Gardens. Even after mny years of minute observation Mr Riviere still pursues his studies in the double sense of the word. Or, again, he may go and merely get mental impressions. "As for anatomy," says Mr Riviere, "some people say - Professor Huxley, for instance - that artists should not go further than skin-deep in their anatomy. I do not agree with that view I say, the deeper the better." Now, of course, every possible movement of a lion must be burnt into Mr Riviere’s brain, and no single lion is a portrait but a combination of several lions. And so it is with Mr Riviere’s dogs, none of which is a portrait, but a combination of dogs all worked together into one. If an animal painter is to transfer the fleeting movements of a wild animal to his canvas he must perforce work at high pressure, as neither the pose nor the colour remains the same for many seconds. And on it is the demand on his his resources, the high pressure at which he must work that takes it out of him. It is the pace that kills, he says.
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