Valentine Cameron Prinsep, often known as Val Princep, (14 February 1838 – 4 November 1904) was a British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school.
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Born in Calcutta, India, his parents were Henry Thoby Prinsep, for sixteen years a member of the Council of India, and Sarah Monckton Pattle, sister of pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle) and Maria Jackson (née Pattle), grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Henry and Sarah had settled at Little Holland House and made it a centre of artistic society.
Prinsep was an intimate friend of G. F. Watts, under whom his son first studied. Val Prinsep also worked in Paris in Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre's atelier: 'Taffy' in his friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby, is said to have been sketched from him. He was an intimate friend of John Everett Millais and of Edward Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled in Italy. He had a share with Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union. With other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he taught at the Working Men's College during the mid 19c.[1]
Prinsep first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862 with his Bianca Capella, his first picture, which attracted marked notice, being a portrait (1866) of General Gordon in Chinese costume. Prinsep lent the costume to Millais who used it in his own painting Esther.
The best of his later exhibits were A Versailles, The Emperor Theophilus chooses his Wife, The Broken Idol and The Goose Girl. He was elected A.R.A. in 1879 and R.A. in 1894. In 1877 he went to India and painted a huge picture of the Delhi Durbar, exhibited in 1880, and afterwards hung at Buckingham Palace.
Prinsep died in London and is buried there in Brompton Cemetery, London.[2]
In 1884, he married Florence, daughter of industrialist and art collector Frederick Richards Leyland.
Prinsep wrote two plays, Cousin Dick and Monsieur le Duc, produced at the Court and the St James's theatres respectively; two novels; and Imperial India: an Artists Journal (1879).
He was an enthusiastic volunteer, and one of the founders of the Artists Rifles.