William Boxall

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Sir William Boxall (29 June 1800 – 6 December 1879) was an English painter and museum director.

He was born in or near Oxford and educated at Abingdon grammar school, before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1819. Between 1827 and 1845 he made a number of trips to Italy to study the old masters. Initially hoping to make his name as a history painter, Boxall later had to turn to the more lucrative genre of portraiture. Among his friends were William Wordsworth, whose portrait he painted, the sculptor John Gibson and the painter Sir Edwin Landseer.

Following his appointment in February 1866 as the director of the National Gallery, Boxall practically gave up painting. His directorship lasted eight years, during which he oversaw the construction of Edward Middleton Barry's celebrated eastern extension and the purchase of both of the Gallery's paintings attributed to Michelangelo. The Manchester Madonna, so named because it came to prominence in the 1857 exhibition Art Treasures in Manchester, was bought in 1870. The authenticity of another Michelangelo, The Entombment was called into question by the House of Lords in 1869, but is now generally regarded to be genuine – unlike another of Boxall's controversial acquisitions, the "Suermondt Rembrandt" [1], now attributed to Nicolaes Maes. After the death of his friend and predecessor as director, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, Boxall secured for the Gallery the paintings from Eastlake's private collection, including works by Pisanello and Piero della Francesca.

[edit] Reference

Avery-Quash, Susanna. “Boxall, William (1800-1879).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

[edit] External links

• William Boxall William Boxall's work on orchids

Preceded by Sir Charles Eastlake

Director of the National Gallery 1866–1874

Succeeded by Sir Frederick Burton