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Windus, William Lindsay
(b Liverpool, 8 July 1822; d London, 9 Oct 1907). English painter. He trained in Liverpool, chiefly under a local portrait painter, William Daniels (1813–80), and at the Liverpool Academy, where he exhibited from 1845 and was an active member from 1848. He first painted figure compositions of historical themes and subjects taken from Shakespeare and Scott, modelled stylistically on William Etty and using bitumen for romantic light effects. An example is the compelling Anne Askew in Prison (1849; Liverpool, Walker A.G.). At the suggestion of his patron John Miller, in 1850 Windus visited London, where he saw Millais’s controversial Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (London, Tate) at the Royal Academy. He became the leader of a small group of sympathetic artists at the Liverpool Academy, including William Davis, who emulated the style of the Pre-Raphaelites. During the 1850s they awarded a £50 prize almost annually to Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Holman Hunt, Millais and Madox Brown, and associated and exhibited with them at the Hogarth Club, London, between 1858 and 1861. Added to his concern for moral seriousness of subject, this Pre-Raphaelite influence led Windus to an exploration of natural lighting in outdoor settings and to fine brushwork, but in a tentative, muted colour range. These characteristics first appeared in Burd Helen (Liverpool, Walker A.G.; see LIVERPOOL, fig. 2), an illustration of a Scottish ballad and his first work to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. There Rossetti brought it to the attention of Ruskin, whose enthusiastic review appeared in his Academy Notes. Ruskin called it the second picture of the year after Millais’s and ‘thoughtful and intense in the highest degree’, although this appraisal was totally reversed in his later dismissal of the modern subject of Too Late (exh. RA 1859; London, Tate), which Windus nevertheless considered his best work. Apart from these works, only two later small landscapes can be called Pre-Raphaelite: The Outlaw (1861–2; Manchester, C.A.G.) and the Stray Lamb (Liverpool, Walker A.G.).
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