Walter Goodman

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Walter Goodman (11 May 1838 - 20 August 1912) was a British painter, illustrator and author.

The son of British portrait painter Julia Salaman (1812-1906) and London linen draper, Louis Goodman (d. 1876), he studied with J. M. Leigh and at the Royal Academy in London, where he was admitted as a student in 1851. The present whereabouts of much of his work is unknown, two notable exceptions being The Printseller (c.1882), acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in 1998, and portraits of actresses Mary Anne Keeley and Fanny Stirling (1885), both in the collection of London's Garrick Club.

Goodman lived for three years in Florence (1861-63), before acccompanying Spanish artist Joaquin Cuadras to the West Indies in 1864. Most of his time there was spent in Cuba working as an artist and journalist, until civil unrest forced him to flee to New York in 1870. He may have spent as much as a year in the United States before returning to London in 1871, where he exhibited a portrait of Evelyn, Daughter of G.J.Reid, Esq. of Tunbridge Wells at the Royal Academy. In 1873 he published an account of his years in Cuba, entitled The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba, to favorable reviews. The book was based upon a series of humorous sketches first published in All the Year Round, a British periodical. A painting from his Cuban period, Home of the Bamboo, has recently been identified by a private collector.

The February, 1874 issue of Cassell's Magazine included two articles by Goodman titled "Saved From a Wreck" and "Cuba Without a Master." That winter also saw the exhibition of oil paintings titled Young Castile and Voices of the Sea at London's Dudley and French Galleries, respectively.

In 1877 two pages of drawings of Russian peasantry by Goodman appeared in the Illustrated London News, as well as an illustration for a Wilkie Collins story, "A Bit for Bob" in the magazine's Christmas Number, entitled "A Little Baggage." In 1878 Goodman scored two coups involving the new Chinese diplomatic missions to Europe. Lin Hsi Hung, Chinese minister to the Court of Berlin, commissioned him to copy the National Gallery's Madonna in Prayer by Sassoferrato, reputedly the first commission given by a Chinese to an English artist. He also painted His Excellency Kuo Ta-Jan (Guo Song Tao), Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James (China's first such ambassador). The portrait was initially exhibited at the Royal Academy and later at The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

In 1883 Goodman offered The Printseller, a fascinating trompe l'oeil depiction of the contents of a printerseller's window (including the merchant himself, placing a figure in the display) at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. Priced at 315 pounds, the painting did not find a buyer, causing the artist to re-exhibit it the following year at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.

Goodman is credited with portraits of the then Duke of Edinburgh (Victoria's second son Alfred) and railroad builder Sir Thomas Brassey and his wife, Sarah Knowles Bolton. His last Royal Academy submission (1888) was a portrait entitled Mrs. Keeley in her 82nd Year which is recorded as having subsequently found its way to London's bohemian Savage Club, of which the artist was a member from 1873 to 1894. Goodman was an admirer of Mary Anne Keeley and her acting family, publishing an appreciation in 1895 entitled The Keeleys on the Stage and at Home, which contains engravings of several of his portrait paintings.

Around 1889 Goodman married Clara Isabel, from Leicester, and moved to Brighton, where a son, Walter Russell, was born, followed by Joaquin (1891), Reginald (1893), Julia (1894) and Keeley (1899). In 1901 he authored a two-part article in the Magazine of Art entitled "Artists Studios: As They Were and As They Are." In the piece Goodman makes it clear that he was on familiar terms (at least enough so as to have been able to visit a number of their studios first hand) with many of the great painters of the Victorian Age, six of whom are portrayed in The Printseller. This is the last known reference to Walter Goodman in the public record. He is believed to have resided at Henfield, Sussex and Stoke St. Mary, Somerset before his death from cancer (1912) in Willesden, North London.

[edit] External links

• [1] The Printseller