Frederick Christian Lewis (1779–1856) was an English etcher, aquatint and stipple engraver, landscape and portrait painter and the brother of Charles Lewis (1786–1836). He studied under J. O. Stadler and in the schools of the Royal Academy and aquatinted most of Thomas Girtin's etchings of Paris, 1803. He made transcripts of drawings by the Old masters for William Young Ottley's Italian School of Design 1808-12 and executed plates for the publisher John Chamberlaine's Original Designs of the most celebrated Masters in the Royal Collection, 1812. He engraved Sir Thomas Lawrence's crayon portraits and was engraver of drawings to Princess Charlotte, Prince Leopold, George IV, William IV, and Queen Victoria. He also painted landscapes, mainly of Devonshire scenery and published several volumes of plates depicting the Devonshire rivers between 1821 and 1843, as well as etchings of the Scenery of the Rivers of England and Wales 1845-7.
Lewis transformed numerous natural history paintings by Philip Reinagle into aquatints. His superlative skills as engraver led to frequent commissions from Royalty, and to his contribution to J. M. W. Turner's Liber Studiorum, a collection of seventy-one etchings with mezzotint, greatly influencing landscape painting.
His son, John Frederick Lewis (1805–1876), was a painter of Italian, Spanish, and Oriental themes.
Another son, also named Frederick Christian Lewis (1813–1875), studied under Sir Thomas Lawrence, went to India, 1834, and painted pictures of durbars for native princes, engraved by his father, and published in England. He died at Genoa.
Famous quotes containing the words frederick, christian and/or lewis:
“For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.”
—John Frederick Nims (b. 1913)
“We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“Men were only made into “men” with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally “a man” any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)