Henry Perlee Parker (1785–1873) was an artist who specialised in portrait and genre paintings. He made his mark in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1820s through patronage by wealthy landowners and through paintings of large-scale events of civic pride. Over a period of forty years his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in London. Coastal scenes of fisherfolk and smugglers were a popular specialism. Through the distribution and sale of mezzotint prints of subjects such as William and Grace Darling Going to the Rescue of the SS Forfarshire, Parker became one of the north-east's best-known nineteenth-century artists. In Newcastle upon Tyne he was central to the setting-up of a Northern Academy for the Arts. Later, in Sheffield, he taught drawing at the Wesleyan Proprietary Grammar School, and in his later years he lived in Hammersmith, London. He had a large family and was married three times.
Early life
Henry Perlee Parker (1795–1873), portrait and genre painter, was born at Plymouth Dock, Devonport, on 15 March 1795. He was the son of Robert and Mary Elizabeth Parker – the name ‘Perlee’ comes from his paternal grandmother, who was French. His father was a teacher of ‘marine and mechanical drawing’. After leaving school, Henry was considered for training as a tailor, then was employed in a coachbuilder's workshop before he set himself up as a portrait painter. In the early 1810s he accompanied Charles Sandoe Gilbert (1760–1831) on sketching tours of Cornwall and saw paintings in the private collections of noblemen. He became acquainted with smugglers on the Cornish coast.
In 1815 Parker married Amy Morfey, and following a stay with relatives in Sunderland they decided to move to Newcastle upon Tyne as Parker had taken ‘such a liking to that town he resolved to try his fortune there’. With five pounds between them, artist and wife found lodgings. He earned money by teaching drawing, painting window blinds, and executing small portraits on tin. By the autumn of 1816 their first child, Mary Perlee Parker, was born.
Portraits and Fancy Pictures
Newcastle – made wealthy from mining, shipbuilding and engineering – was undergoing a huge expansion of population at this time. Parker was aware of the importance of self-publicity for an artist and the need to ‘network’. He displayed examples of his work in a prominent shop window with the notice: ‘Likenesses done in this style at one guinea each.’ Over the next few years seventy commissions followed, enabling the artist to move to more respectable apartments in Pilgrim Street.
In addition to portraits, Parker produced ‘fancy pictures’ for broker's shops. David Mannings defines ‘fancy pictures’ as being ‘contemporary genre pictures of sentimental realism, in which the artist’s own whimsy played a substantial part'. Parker was a contemporary of David Wilkie (1785–1841), a particularly successful exponent of this type of droll depiction of everyday situations and someone whose work at times provided an inspiration. That Parker’s painting Dead Game was chosen for exhibition at Royal Academy in London in 1817 added to his artistic standing.
Characters of Newcastle
‘Being a young man of good address and prepossessing appearance and developing a vigorous and taking style of painting figure subjects, Mr. Parker received from the people of Tyneside flattering encouragement and support.' Eccentric Characters of Newcastle (aka Hell’s Kitchen), from about 1817, was one of Parker’s best-known early paintings. It shows fourteen ‘eccentrics’ – locally known characters, mainly paupers from the streets of the Quayside area of Newcastle – assembled in the Flying Horse drinking house. The painting was bought for 20 guineas by Charles John Brandling (1769–1826), an influential landowner and coal magnate.
Newcastle had a reputation for the artistic merit of its book illustration and printing industries, and Parker became acquainted with two exponents: Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) and Thomas Miles Richardson(1784–1848). An engraving by G. Armstrong of Eccentric Characters of Newcastle 'became exceedingly popular'. When Brandling became MP for Northumberland, in 1820, he commission a portrait by Parker that was engraved. Reproductive engraving had a double value in that it brought artwork within the means of the emerging middle classes and it widened the artist's reputation. Brandling commissioned further work over the next few years, and most importantly the relationship gave Parker an entrée into Tyneside society.