Wynford Dewhurst

Wynford Dewhurst RBA (26 January 1864 – 9 July 1941) was an English Impressionist painter and notable art theorist. He spent considerable time in France and his work was profoundly influenced by Claude Monet.

Biography

Wynford Dewhurst was born Thomas Edward Smith to an affluent family in Manchester in 1864. He was educated at home by a private tutor and later at Mintholme College. Although he originally trained to enter the legal profession, he showed artistic flair and decided to pursue a career as a painter after some of his drawings were published in various journals.

He gained artistic training in France at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (at which time he changed his name to Wynford Dewhurst by deed poll), where he was a pupil of the renowned French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Despite his teacher Gérome's rejection of the radical Impressionist movement in favour of a highly finished academic style (Gérome continued the development and conservation of French Neoclassicism), Dewhurst was heavily influenced by the Impressionists. It is well known that he first encountered Impressionism, to which he was instantly attracted, in the work of Emile Claus in the Maddocks Collection in Bradford. However his most important mentor would become Claude Monet.

It was Monet to whom Dewhurst dedicated his pioneering account of French Impressionism, Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development, in 1904. This was the first important study of the French painters to be published in English. As well as helping to reintroduce British artists to this style of painting, Dewhurst's book called attention to the French Impressionists' debt to the British artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, claiming that the Impressionists simply developed their existing painterly techniques."(By the turn of the century) British painters, if not the British public, had reconciled themselves to impressionism."