ALBERT GOODWIN RWS (1845-1932) Biography

Exhibition History

Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, 1892, number 208
Edinburgh, Calton Gallery, Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, August 1985

Description / Expertise

Albert Goodwin first travelled to Venice in 1872 in the company of John Ruskin, the greatest enthusiast for the city of the Victorian age. Although Goodwin made subsequent visits there, he developed his sketches and ideas from this early trip until the end of the century, stating in the catalogue of his 1896 London exhibition:

Though I date my pictures at the time of their completion, I would by no means have it inferred that the whole of this exhibition has been done in the last year. Some of the subjects were begun as many as twenty years ago.

It is clear, however, that the present work has its genesis in a later visit. Albert Goodwin shed the Pre-Raphaelite inspiration, and under Turner's influence developed a brilliant rendering of space and atmosphere, seen to full effect in his handling of the pastel.

His qualities were still recognised in 1933 in his obituaries, for Albert Goodwin was one of the few Victorian painters to retain his popularity in the twentieth century. The Connoisseur wrote:

Mr. Albert Goodwin... was one of the few artists for whom some measure of Old Mastership can be reasonably predicted in their lifetimes. A landscape painter of rare delicacy and imagination, he possessed the art of capturing effects so ethereal as to make them almost impossible of attainment by ordinary means. There are not many artists who have this facility, but Goodwin was one of them.