George John Pinwell,RWS 1872
Watercolour and bodycolour
55.9x109.2cm
Gilbert a Becket's Troth (mk46) 1842-1875
English illustrator and painter. He was born in humble circumstances and was largely untrained. He was briefly a student at St Martin's Lane Art School and at Heatherley's. From 1863 he contributed woodblock illustrations to magazines, establishing his reputation in 1865 with the Dalziel brothers' editions of The Arabian Nights and The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Pinwell's finest drawings were commissioned for the Dalziels' poetry gift-books. With another illustrator, John William North (1842-1924), he worked at Halsway Manor in Somerset in 1865, experimenting with formal effects based on the structure of stone farm buildings or on the wooden beams of barn interiors (his drawings do not seem to have survived). Some of the illustrations for A Round of Days (1866) and Wayside Posies (1867) present an ideal vision of the countryside, but a vein of social concern is also present. In The Journey's End, from Wayside Posies, a strolling player lies dead, worn out by hardship and hunger. For an illustrated edition of Jean Ingelow's Poems (1867),
