1815–1885
Richard Ansdell was a British painter best known for animal subjects and rural genre scenes. Born in Liverpool, he was educated at the Liverpool Blue Coat School and showed early talent for drawing. After school he worked for a portrait painter in Chatham Street and briefly as a sign painter in the Netherlands.
He first exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1835, becoming a student there in 1836. His sporting and pastoral pictures quickly attracted patrons. Ansdell debuted at the Royal Academy in 1840 with Grouse Shooting and A Galloway Farm, and went on to show there every year until his death—149 works in total. He also exhibited at the British Institution from 1846.
In 1841 he married Maria Romer; they had eleven children and settled in Kensington in 1847. From 1850 he collaborated with landscape painter Thomas Creswick (e.g., The South Downs, England’s Day in the Country) and later with William Powell Frith. Travels with John Phillip to Spain in 1856–57 led to a series of Iberian subjects such as The Water Carrier and The Road to Seville.
Ansdell received a gold medal at the 1855 Paris Exhibition for The Wolf Slyer and Taming the Drove, won the Heywood Medal three times at the Manchester Royal Institution, became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1861, and a Royal Academician in 1870. He kept a summer residence at Lytham St Annes; the district of Ansdell is named after him—the only English artist so honoured.
He died at Collingwood Tower, Frimley, Hampshire, on 20 April 1885 and was buried at Brookwood Cemetery.
Among his best-known paintings are Stag at Bay (1846), The Combat (1847), and The Fight for the Standard (1848). Contemporary critics often compared his themes to Edwin Landseer’s, judging Ansdell popular and prolific if less emotive. He was reputedly exacting—famously declining royal work unless Queen Victoria’s dogs were brought to his studio.
Major holdings are in the Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), the Lytham St Annes Art Collection, and the Harris Museum (Preston), with additional works owned by Fylde Borough Council and shown periodically at the Fylde Gallery.
