The Bavarian-born artist was raised in Southampton, moving to the town with his parents in 1857 at the age of eight. They lived first at 10 Windsor Terrace and later at 1 Beckford Terrace in Manchester Street. He studied at the Southampton School of Art before moving to London to complete his studies at the National Art Training School in South Kensington. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1869 and shot to fame with his painting The Last Muster in 1875. By this time he had moved with his parents to Bushey in Hertfordshire. In the 1880s he concentrated on the financially rewarding area of portraiture. Richard Wagner, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Cecil Rhodes (image 2) were just three of the famous Victorians he painted. He opened an art school at Bushey in 1883 and succeeded Ruskin as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University in 1885. He was knighted in 1907. He returned to Southampton in 1910 to visit his old house in Windsor Terrace. His last visit to the town was in October 1913, six months before his death.
The house in Windsor Terrace was demolished in 1936 to make way for the Hants and Dorset bus station, which was in turn demolished in the 1980s when the Marlands Shopping Centre was built. Beckford Terrace also disappeared at this time.
1. Sir Hubert Herkomer
Undated self portrait
2. Cecil Rhodes
Oil painting by Herkomer, c.1903
See also
Further reading:
Southampton People, by John Edgar Mann, p54-55. (HS/t)
Familiar and Forgotten, by Southampton City Art Gallery. (HS/t)
The Herkomers, by Sir Hubert von Herkomer. (HS/t)
Dictionary of Art, Vol 14, by Jane Turner (ed).
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