Biography
William Edward Frost (September 1810 – 4 June 1877) was an English painter of the Victorian era. Virtually alone among English artists in the middle Victorian period, he devoted his practice to the portrayal of the female nude.
Frost was educated in the schools of the Royal Academy, beginning in 1829; he established a reputation as a portrait painter before branching into historical and mythological subjects, including the subgenre of fairy painting that was characteristic of Victorian art. In 1839 he won the Royal Academy's gold medal for his Prometheus Bound, and in 1843 he won a prize in the Westminster Hall competition for his Una Alarmed by Fauns (a subject from Spenser's The Faerie Queene). He was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1846, and a full member in 1870.
Frost is widely recognized as a follower of William Etty, who preceded him as the primary British painter of nudes in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Despite the prudishness of the Victorian era, Frost's relatively chaste nudes were popular, and his career was financially successful.
At their best Frost's works have a distinctive jewel-like charm, his attractive young women models possessing a pert, self-conscious quality which makes them more titillating than Etty's powerful studies....
- —Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting
This biography is from Wikipedia under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. Spotted a problem? Let us know.
Read full Wikipedia entryArtworks
-
William Edward Frost Warrior Seated at a Table
date not known -
William Edward Frost Meditation
date not known
You might like
-
Edward Calvert
1799–1883 -
Richard Dadd
1817–1886 -
John Scarlett Davis
1804–1845 -
Augustus Leopold Egg
1816–1863 -
William Etty
1787–1849 -
Charles Samuel Keene
1823–1891 -
Charles Landseer
1799–1879 -
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer
1802–1873 -
Charles Robert Leslie
1794–1859 -
John Frederick Lewis
1805–1876 -
Daniel Maclise
1806–1870 -
Robert Braithwaite Martineau
1826–1869 -
James Smetham
1821–1889 -
Alfred Stevens
1817–1875 -
Henry Wallis
1830–1916