Frederick Wedmore

Frederick Wedmore (1844-), English art critic and man of letters, was born at Richmond Hill, Clifton, on the 9th of July 1844, the eldest son of Thomas Wedmore of Druids Stoke, Stoke Bishop. His family were Quakers, and he was educated at a Quaker private school and then in Lausanne and Paris. After a short experience of journalism in Bristol he came to London in 1868, and began to write for the Spectator. His early works included two novels, but the best examples of his careful and artistic prose are perhaps to be found in his volumes of short stories, Pastorals of France (1877), Renunciations (1893), Orgeas and Miradou (1896), reprinted in 1905 as A Dream of Provence. In 1900 he published another novel, The Collapse of the Penitent. As early as 1878 he had begun a long connexion with the London Standard a s art critic. He began his studies on etching with a noteworthy paper in the Nineteenth Century (1877-1878) on the etchings of Charles Meryon. This was followed by The Four Masters of Etching (1883), with original etchings by Sir F. S. Haden, Jules Ferdinand Jacque - mart, J. M. Whistler, and Alphonse Legros; Etching in England (1895); an English edition (1894) of E. Michel's Rembrandt; and a study and a catalogue of Whistler's Etchings (1899). His other works include Studies in English Art (2 vols., 1876-1880), The Masters of Genre Painting (1880), English Water Colour (1902), Turner and Ruskin ( 2 vols., 1900).