Henry Howard

Henry Howard RA (31 January 1769 – 5 October 1847) was an early 19th-century British portrait and history painter.

Biography He was born in London and after being educated at a school in Hounslow, he started studying with the painter Philip Reinagle in 1786. In 1788 he began attending the Royal Academy Schools and was awarded a silver medal for drawing from life and a gold medal for historical painting for his Caractacus Recognising the Dead Body of his Son.

In March 1791, Howard traveled to Italy, France, and Switzerland. In Rome, he met and studied sculpture with John Flaxman and John Deare. In 1792 he painted a Dream of Cain. While abroad he applied to the Royal Academy for a grant after the bankruptcy of his father. Two years later, he returned to Britain by way of Vienna and Dresden. He began instructing Reinagle's daughter Jane in drawing and married her in 1803. Together they had four daughters and three sons. From 1806 they lived at 50 Newman Street, Westminster, until his death. One of Howard's most important patrons was Lord Egremont, a significant collector. His history paintings are hard to find on public display but his ceiling for the dining-room of the Sir John Soane's Museum, an Aurora adapted from Guido Reni (1837), can be seen obliquely.

In addition to his portraiture and historical painting, Howard worked on many decorative works. In 1805, a Mr. Hibbert commissioned him to paint a Cupid and Psyche frieze in 1814, along with several other artists. He painted large transparencies, apparently to be lighted from behind, for the "Grand Revolving Temple of Concord" built in Green Park for the visit of several sovereigns to celebrate (prematurely) the defeat of Napoleon. This was, according to some accounts, destroyed by, and according to others only saved by the cavalry from, "the multitudes of idle and dissolute spectators of all sorts". He also worked on a Solar System for the ceiling of Stafford House in 1835, then housing a superb art collection open to the public, as well as several other ceiling projects. and the second, of Fairies on the Sea Shore in her Poetical Catalogue of Modern Paintings in her 1825 volume The Troubadour; Catalogue of Pictures, and Historical Sketches, this latter poem reappearing in The Cabinet of Modern Art, 1836 accompanied by an engraving (by Edward Goodall).

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