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Boxall, Sir William
(b Oxford, 29 June 1800; d London, 6 Dec 1879). English painter and museum director. The son of an Oxford taxation official, he entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1819. He worked in London between 1823 and 1833, chiefly as a portrait painter but occasionally exhibiting history and subject pictures in an endeavour to gain recognition; among the subjects he painted were mythological scenes and literary themes from Milton and Shakespeare. However, Boxall’s success lay in portraiture, and between the mid-1830s and the 1860s he enjoyed some reputation as a society painter and also for his likenesses of leading literary, artistic and intellectual figures of the day, for example John Gibson (1864; London, RA). To further his ambition to succeed as a history painter he travelled and studied in Italy (1833–6), but portraiture remained his principal employment, accounting for most of his exhibited works (London, RA, 1818, 1823–66, 1880; London, British Institution, 1826–44). He was elected ARA in 1851 and RA in 1863.
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