Frith

Frith, William Powell, R.A., born at Studley, near Ripon, in 1819, began to study painting under Sass in 1835, and four years later exhibited his first picture at the British Institution. In 1845 The Village Pastor marked his first attempt to reproduce the aspects of contemporary English life. It won for him the associateship of the Royal Academy. His English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago and his Coming of Age in the Olden Time added to his popularity, so that in 1851 he was elected R.A. Ramsgate Sands (1854), The Berby Bay (1858), Claude Duval (1860), The Railway Station (1862), and The Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales (1865), painted for her Majesty, brought Mr. Frith to the zenith of his fame, when the largest price ever paid till then for the work of a living artist was given for his Johnsonian group exhibited in 1868 and sold in 1875. Cltarles II.'s Last Sunday, A Private Hew of the Royal Academy, For Better for Worse, Br. Johnson's Tardy Gallantry, and The Road to Ruin are among his later productions, which have suffered by the change of public taste, though they are in no way inferior to his earlier achievements. Mr. Frith retired from the active duties of an Academician in 1890, and has during his later years published four pleasant volumes of autobiography.