George Cattermole, 1800 - 1868 The Armourer's Gallery

George Cattermole, 1800 - 1868

The Armourer's Gallery

pencil and watercolour

16 x 11 in. (28 x 41 cm.)

Cattermole, George (1800–1868), watercolour painter and illustrator, was born on 10 August 1800 in the village of Dickleburgh, near Diss, Norfolk, the youngest of seven children, six sons and a daughter, of parents whose names are not known.

Cattermole's mother died when he was very young and he was raised and taught by his father, a man of independent means. He was a great reader, familiar with Shakespeare and Scott from an early age. Cattermole knew history well, especially English history, was a good Latin scholar, and wrote in a correct and classic style. He may have served as an assistant at his father's school in Norfolk before his departure for London, where he arrived by 1819.

Soon thereafter, Cattermole began work as an architectural draughtsman for the antiquary John Britton and developed his skills of observation and accuracy, training congenial with his antiquarian and artistic interests.

With one of his brothers, the Revd Richard Cattermole (1795?–1858), Cattermole contributed to two of Britton's most important series of publications: Cathedral Antiquities of England (14 vols., 1814–35) and The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain (1807–26). Of the former Cattermole contributed to four volumes and Richard to three. Some of the most elaborate engraved drawings appear above the name of George Cattermole: nineteen in the volume on Canterbury and seven in that for Oxford, both published in 1821, twelve for Wells in 1824, and one drawing for Peterborough in 1828. Eighteen engravings after Cattermole's drawings appear in the fifth volume (1826) of Architectural Antiquities.

Cattermole illustrated numerous books. Evenings at Haddon Hall (1832), edited by the baroness de Calabrella, contained twenty-four fancy subjects, which were ‘supposed to be in a portfolio, turned over by a birthday party, confined to the house at Haddon by the snow’ (Roget, 2.73). In the 1830s Cattermole travelled to Scotland to sketch localities mentioned in the Waverley novels by Walter Scott. Five drawings illustrating scenes from four of Scott's novels were exhibited between 1836 and 1850 at the Old Watercolour Society. Certain of Cattermole's drawings were engraved for illustrations to later editions of the Waverley novels. Twenty-one engravings after drawings by Cattermole were published in Heath's Pictorial Annual for 1835: Scott and Scotland by Leitch Ritchie. In his art Cattermole gave visual expression to Scott's evocation of a bygone age in Scotland. He also illustrated volumes 1 (1841) and 2 (1844) of Richard Cattermole's The Great Civil War of Charles I and the Parliament, with a total of twenty-eight engravings after his picturesque and vigorous sketches.

Cattermole enjoyed riding as a young man, and was an excellent carriage driver. His natural vivacity and good fellowship caused him to be a general favourite. He was a good conversationalist in both French and Spanish, and a man of literary tastes, who preferred intellectual associates of the more brilliant kind. An intimate of Count d'Orsay and Lady Blessington at Gore House, he was part of their circle of fashionable people from the worlds of art and literature in London. He was a member of the Garrick Club, and in 1838 was elected to the Athenaeum. In the late 1830s he moved into a suite of private chambers in The Albany, formerly occupied first by Lord Byron (of whom he made a posthumous drawing now in a private collection, after the portrait by Richard Westall, 1813) and later by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Cattermole included among his close friends Robert Browning, Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Sir Edwin Landseer, Thomas Macaulay, Daniel Maclise, William Macready, Clarkson Stanfield, and William Makepeace Thac