Richard Burchett - Artist

Artist

Burchett exhibited five works, apparently all large history paintings, at the Royal Academy between 1847 (The Death of Marmion, "famous in its day" according to Hugh Thomas) and 1873 (The Making of the New Forest). These are rather generously described as "in the Pre-Raphaelite style" by the DNB. His best-known work in this genre is Sanctuary (RA, 1867), the snappy modern title for Edward IV Withheld by Ecclesiastics from Pursuing Lancastrian Fugitives into a Church, in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. William Bell Scott has an anecdote of Burchett, who "had chosen the subject as a glorious example of the power of the Church and the faith of the prince at that blessed period in Merry England" failing to sell the painting to an "extreme Radical" shipping magnate: ""I admire the picture, Mr. Burchett, it is excellently painted, and I like it for its subject ; these men in full armour won't go in, they won't end the day completely after risking all their lives, because of that old priest with the jack-in-the-box! Superstition, you see, turns them into caitiffs!" This knocked over poor Burchett so much, the transaction came to nothing" He exhibited a work at the British Institution in 1855. Scott comments that Burchett: "gave himself up to historical painting on a rather large scale, just the kind of art which English taste and the R. Academy as the mediocre exponent of the same would like to crush out of existence".

However the work which has attracted the most attention and praise from critics in recent decades is what appears to be his "only known landscape", View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight probably of 1855, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, who describe it as a "minor masterpiece". This small painting, which more closely approaches a Pre-Raphaelite landscape style, shows a half-harvested cornfield, with tools and jugs of the farm-workers piled up beside a corn stook. But the only figures visible are two clearly middle-class women, no doubt part of the same party as the artist, one sitting against a stook reading a book, and the other walking with a parasol. Any georgic or realist focus on agriculture is absent "his cornfield is just part of a landscape where middle-class people take their leisure. The corn is no more or no less useful than the beaches which we imagine to be in the distance of this brilliantly coloured painting". Here too a more subtle hint of religious feeling is found: "the church in the distance hints at the source of the bounty represented by the partially garnered harvest in the foreground fields". Treatments of the almost identical view by William Dyce and James Collinson (Mother and Child, Mellon Centre, Yale), both Burchett's colleagues at the school, are taken by Geoffrey Grigson to mean that the three artists were on a visit, or holiday, together. Dyce, like Burchett, was an artist who saw himself as a history painter but is now most often remembered for a single Pre-Raphaelitish landscape, his Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858.

There are a number of public paintings by Burchett, with help of his students, commissioned through the school. He and his students painted, from Renaissance portraits, a number of full-length portraits of the House of Tudor for the royal antechamber to the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster (1855-9). He painted other works for the new Palace, including a large Spanish Armada scene The English Fleet Pursuing the Spanish Fleet Against Fowey, copying from an 18th century print a one of a set of tapestries made for Lord Howard of Effingham, the victorious admiral. The death of Prince Albert brought the project to reproduce the full set to an end, but it was revived in the 21st century, and finally completed in 2010. Like the works in the Palace by better-known painters like Dyce, these have been generally disliked by critics from their first unveiling; the overall painting of the Palace after its rebuilding was probably the largest public painting commission in England during the 19th century, and, unlike the architecture of the Palace, has been regarded as very disappointing by most critics from the start.

From a number of designs for mosaics for the exteriors to the south court of the Victoria and Albert Museum he produced William Torrell (two versions in fact) and William of Wykeham. The mosaics remain in place, and two of the cartoons are now themselves on display in the staircase on the Exhibition Road side of the building. He and his students decorated large medallions in the dome of the now-vanished Great Exhibition building of 1862 at South Kensington, and he painted a window in the Greenwich Hospital.