James Campbell - Dinner in View

oil on canvas
14 x 12in. (35.5 x 30.5cm.)

Liverpool. Liverpool Academy. 1856, no.494 (5 gns.)

Like W.L. Windus, William Davis, David Alexander Williamson and others, Campbell belonged to the group of Liverpool painters who formed a distinct and early offshoot of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Born in Liverpool, the son of a book-keeper with the Sun Insurance Company, he entered the Liverpool Academy Schools in 1851, but by the end of the year had proceeded to the Royal Academy Schools in London. He exhibited at the Liverpool Academy 1852-65, becoming an Associate in 1854 and a Member two years later. He also showed at the Royal Academy and at Suffolk Street in London, and at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

Campbell's adoption of Pre-Raphaellitism was partly inspired by the pictures which Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais showed at the Liverpool Academy in the 1850s (often being awarded the £50 annual prize), and partly by first-hand acquaintance with the Pre-Raphaelite circle in London. In 1857 he contributed to their exhibition in Russell Place, and he belonged to the Hogarth Club which they established in April 1858 as a meeting place and exhibition gallery. This picture is typical of Campbells work at this period in its application of the Pre-Raphaehte technique, attention to detail and intensity of feeling to a genre or social realist subject. Other examples are Girl with Jug of Ale and Pipes (1856) and Waiting for Legal Advice (1857), both in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and The Wife's Remonstrance (1858) in the Birmingham City Art Gallery, which was praised by Ruskin in his Academy Notes and for many years was mistaken for a work by Millais. Like most of the Liverpool Pre-Raphaelites, Campbell was given much-needed support by John Miller, a local shipping merchant who actively encouraged the movement. Another patron was James Leathart, the Newcastle industrialist who built up one of the finest contemporary collections of Pre-Raphaehre paintings.

From the early 1860s Campbell's work became more conventional, as further examples at Liverpool show. By January 1863 he had moved to London, but his career there did not prosper, and in later life he went blind. He married a widow, by whom he had children, and for a time lived at Reigate, but he eventually returned to Liverpool where, like his fellow Pre-Raphaelite J.E. Worrall, he subsisted on a pension granted by the ILA. He died at Birkenhead on Christmas Day 1893.

We are grateful to Mary Bennett and to Edward Morris, Curator of Fine Art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, for their help in preparing this entry.

Estimate: £15,000-20,000