(b Leeds, 29 Aug 1830; d Leeds, 23 Jan 1888). English painter. He spent his early years in Leeds, where his father was a newspaper proprietor, but came to London around 1846 to study lithography in the firm of Day & Haghe. His obituary in The Athenaeum records that he went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, but his name does not appear in the registers. He exhibited watercolours at the Society of British Artists in 1849 and 1850 and at the Royal Academy in 1851. At this period his work has a fluidity and a freedom of handling that is closer to Richard Parkes Bonington than to the prevailing style of Victorian watercolours. Around 1852 he came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and radically altered his style. His oil painting of the Chapel, Bolton (exh. RA 1853; Northampton, Cent. Mus. & A.G.) is a meticulously rendered view of the abbey ruins in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. This was followed the next year by At Bolton (Leeds, C.A.G.), another view of Bolton Abbey, this time with a deer prominent in the foreground. Both paintings illustrate lines from William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The White Doe of Ryleston’. Wordsworth was also the inspiration for the small painting Study in March (Oxford, Ashmolean), which is now perhaps Inchbold’s best-known work and was highly praised when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855. The Spectator described it as ‘a most delicious little piece—pure and perfect in its soft colour and unsurpassedly tender as a description of the season of early promise’.

• Inchbold, J(ohn) W(illiam)
  • England, §III, 4: Painting and graphic arts, c 1830–c 1855
  • Pre-Raphaelitism, §1: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood