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Fielding.
English family of artists. The portrait and landscape painter Nathan Theodore Fielding ( fl 1775–1819) was the father of six artists. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1799 and at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1815. The family moved around England: in 1788 they were in Acton (London), and from 1794 to 1799 they lived in Durham; by 1800 they were back in London and then in 1804 they moved to the Lake District, first living at Ambleside and then at Keswick. Such moves were presumably an attempt to capture the market for picturesque landscape and were not unusual among this class of painter. Fielding sr painted small canvases of the Cumberland scenery, which his sons then copied. After his wife died c. 1806–7, Fielding moved with his children to Manchester and then to London. He was described in 1809 as ‘a veteran artist whose old heads in the manner of [Balthasar] Denner are purchased at high prices by the admirers of that master’ (Roget, p. 258). Two paintings by him (sold Sotheby’s, London, 13 July 1988; illus. in cat.) are dated 1781 and 1782 and represent views near Sowerby Bridge, W. Yorks. They suggest a provincial skill in bird’s-eye views and local topography. It is difficult to unravel the Fielding oeuvre, as the family were close collaborators, and all the brothers as well as one daughter, Amelia (b 1785), were painters. The following members have entries:
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