"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of Impressionist landscape painters in the Public Domain with a ten-piece Exhibition of works by British artist Richard Gay Somerset (1848-1928).

 

Son of the sub-editor and sometimes art critic of the Old Manchester Courier, Somerset was educated at the Manchester School of Art, becoming one of that school’s principal painters in the 1870s and 1880s. An excellent landscape painter, his work was highly praised by British art critics. He enjoyed travelling and made sixteen trips up and down the Mediterranean in coasting steamers. On these journeys he preferred to paint subjects with an archaeological interest.

 

Somerset moved to North Wales and became a founding member of the Royal Cambrian Academy, established in 1881. Despite being expelled from the Academy in 1885 (for unspecified misdemeanours) Somerset continued to live and work in Betws-y-Coed. The artist was a Scottish painter who was Keeper of the National Gallery of Scotland from 1895 to 1907 and became Painter and Limner to the King in 1908. Somerset and was also one of the oldest members of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. He was an eminent member of the Manchester School of Painters and an original member of the Royal Cambrian Academy, for which he became vice-president in 1919.