Biography for John Frederick Lewis

Employment

Lewis was an artist who became known for his views based on his extensive travels. At the age of 15 he exhibited and sold his first picture in London which was of an animal subject, and for a time, specialised in both painting and making etchings of animals, regularly in the company of Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) who was to become one of the most celebrated painter of animals in British Art. Lewis gained rapid popularity and he exhibited at the Royal Academy and at other centres in London. In 1832-1833 he visited Spain, and two books of lithographic plates based on his designs were published. The latter of 1836 was both drawn and lithographed by the artist and it was entitled Lewis's Sketches of Spain and Spanish Character. In 1837 he travelled through Europe to Constantinople (Istanbul) arriving in 1840 and a year later settled in Cairo where he was to stay for 10 years. When he returned to England in 1851, his watercolours of oriental subjects were highly prized, and it is for these works, full of the exoticism and mystery of a then barely known culture, that his reputation was secured. He became a Royal Academician (RA) in 1865.