J. Comyns Carr

Joseph William Comyns Carr (1 March 1849 – 12 December 1916), often referred to as J. Comyns Carr, was an English drama and art critic, gallery director, author, poet, playwright and theatre manager.

Beginning his career as an art critic, Carr was a vigorous advocate for Pre-Raphaelite art and a vocal critic of the "short-sighted" art establishment. In 1877 he became a director of the Grosvenor Gallery and promoting Pre-Raphaelite painters and other important exhibitors, such as James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Ten years later he founded the rival New Gallery.

Carr also wrote essays, books, plays, librettos, English-language adaptations of foreign works and stage adaptations of Dickens novels and classic tales like King Arthur and Faust.

Early life and family

J. Comyns Carr was born in Marylebone, Middlesex, England, the seventh of ten children. His parents were Jonathan Carr, a woollen draper, and his Irish wife, Catherine Grace Comyns. Kate Comyns Carr, his sister, became a portrait artist; his brother Jonathan Carr developed the world's first garden suburb Bedford Park. Comyns Carr was educated at Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, Middlesex, from 1862 to 1865. He studied law at the University of London and graduated in 1869, beginning to practise at the bar at the Inner Temple, London. He soon gave up law for a career in journalism and became drama critic for the Echo.

In 1873 in Dresden, Carr married the author Alice Laura Vansittart née Strettell (1850–1927), a novelist and designer. Alice designed the bold costume that Ellen Terry wore as Lady Macbeth, and in which John Singer Sargent painted her in 1889. Sargent also painted Mrs Comyns Carr in 1889 and several portraits of her sister, Alma, and illustrated Alma's Spanish and Italian Folk-Songs in 1897. Carr and his wife had three children: Philip, Dorothy and Arthur (a barrister and Liberal Member of Parliament). Carr was a member of the Arts Club and the Garrick Club. He published two memoirs: Some Eminent Victorians (1908), and Coasting Bohemia (1914).