William Kay Blacklock

William Kay Blacklock (1872 – 11 August 1924) was a British artist in the mediums of watercolours and oils.

Biography

William Blacklock was born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, in North East England, in 1872. He was one of three children of John Blacklock, an engine fitter, and his wife Isabella. His father died in 1886. According to the 1891 census, William was 18 years old and was working as a lithographer's apprentice, while living with his widowed mother. He continued to live with his mother, at least until 1901, practising the trade of lithography. The colony had been founded by the artist Philip Wilson Steer, who gathered around him a circle of English Impressionists.

His wife, who was called "Nellie", modelled for him, as did their daughter Eleanor. Their only child, Eleanor Irene, was born in Chelsea during 1910. During 1907, Blacklock painted the oil on canvas Going to Church; it measures . It was purchased by the National Liverpool Museum the same year it was painted.

Philip Wilson Steer, (1860-1942), founded a colony of artists in Walberswick, which Blacklock joined. Although Steer was the leading figure of the British Impressionist school, Blacklock did not adopt this style. Instead he painted in a style closer to traditional Victorian genre painting, depicting rural life and landscapes. Traces of the French realism influenced by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) are also shown in Blacklock's technique. His themes are close to the academic realism. His attitude to nature is demonstrated by the titles of a number of his Royal Academy exhibits: Evening Glow – Rye 1901, A Sunny Hillside, 1902 and A Sunny Corner, 1911, and a Dutch Idyll in 1914. The tendency towards realism, and the distinctiveness of his personal interpretation of country life, have meant that Blacklock still enjoys a certain popularity as a watercolourist and painter.

Gallery