Daniel Alexander Williamson

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, The Liverpool Academy, 1860, no. 294
London, Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, December 2010 - January 2011

Daniel Alexander Williamson is one of the remarkable group of artists known as the 'Liverpool Pre-Raphaelites'. His brilliantly-coloured, intensely-detailed and radiantly-lit pictures are among the most interesting of the group, although they are rare. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a landscape painter Daniel Williamson, grandson of the artist John Williamson and nephew of Samuel Williamson. The young Daniel Alexander was apprenticed as a draughtsman to a Liverpool cabinetmaker but following his move to London around 1849 he began to concentrate on painting and attended life classes in Newman Street, London. In London he appears to have come into contact with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and adopted their way of painting with translucent glazes on a white ground. When he returned to Lancashire in 1861 - moving to the village of Warton-in-Carnforth - he continued to paint in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. He was friends with fellow Liverpool artist, William Lindsay Windus and they often went of painting excursions into the countryside together. Spring bears an address label from when Williamson was living at Albert Cottages in South London between 1857 and 1861. The lyric subject of the young shepherd and his flock recalls the work of William Holman Hunt and Samuel Palmer.