Hubert von Herkomer

Sir Hubert von Herkomer CVO RA (1849-1914), born as Hubert Herkomer, was a Bavarian-born British painter, pioneering film-director, and composer. Though a very successful portrait artist, especially of men, he is mainly remembered for his earlier works that took a realistic approach to the conditions of life of the poor. 

Herkomer was born on 26 May 1849 at Waal, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, the son of Lorenz Herkomer (1825-1888), a wood-carver of great ability, and his wife Josephine Herkomer, née Niggl (1826-1879). His family was poor, and his mother tried to supplement his father's earnings by giving music lessons. 

Lorenz Herkomer left Bavaria in 1851 with his wife and child for the United States, settling in Cleveland, Ohio. They soon returned to Europe and in 1857 settled in Southampton, where the family spent seventeen years before moving to Watford. Hubert's education was slight: "He went to school for a month or two, and, falling ill never returned." In 1861, Herkomer's father was recorded at that address as an artist aged 47 and his mother as a 39-year-old music teacher. 

While in Southampton, Herkomer went to the school of art there and began his formal art training. An uncle in the United States commissioned his father to carve the Four Evangelists in wood. Receiving some money, his father determined to take Hubert to Munich, so that he could study art there while his father worked on the carvings.

In 1866, Herkomer began a more serious course of study at the South Kensington Schools.

In 1869 Herkomer exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts and sold his first picture for two guineas. Also in 1869, he began working as an illustrator for the newly founded newspaper The Graphic, a rival of the Illustrated London News.

On 10 January 1872, Herkomer was naturalised as a British subject. Then aged 22 and living at 32, Smith Street, Chelsea, he was described as an unmarried artist. His oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria was witnessed by Sir Sills John Gibbons, Lord Mayor of London.

In 1873, Herkomer visited a friend who lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and the next year he rented a pair of cottages there called Dyreham and a studio near Melbourne Road, Bushey. By the time he was twenty-four, he had sold a painting for five hundred pounds. 

In 1890 Herkomer was elected a Royal Academician, in 1893 an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society, and the next year a full member.

At Bushey, Herkomer built a large house, Lululaund, named after Lulu Griffith, the second of his three wives, in a heavily German style, designed about 1886 by the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, for whom he painted a portrait. This house was completed in 1894 and thereafter served as studio and school. It contained a theatre, where Herkomer put on productions of his own plays and musical compositions and also made films.

On her deathbed, in 1901, Queen Victoria was initially photographed in study and eventually painted by Herkomer as an alternative to the more traditional mask produced in wax, which her son, the new king Edward VII, decried. The painting, showing the Queen lying half-length among lilies and other flowers, swathed in white tulle, her right hand holding a cross, is part of the Royal Collection held at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where it hangs in the Pavilion Principal Stairs Vestibule. In 1907, Herkomer was knighted by King Edward VII.

Despite being a prominent member of Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Watercolour Society, and Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, as well as being on familiar terms with the royal family, Herkomer was never totally accepted by the British establishment, as he was ultimately a victim of the deteriorating relationship between Great Britain and Germany, which he shuttled between, spending most of his summers in Bavaria.

Herkomer had strong connections with Wales. His second and third wives hailed from Ruthin, and he spent long periods in Snowdonia painting with his friend, Charles Mansel Lewis from Stradey Castle, Llanelli. In 1899, Herkomer designed the Grand Sword of the Gorsedd of Bards, and he also designed some of its other regalia. Of Herkomer's work for the Gorsedd, Jan Morris has noted that he "created for its functionaries gloriously neo-Druidical robes and insignia of gold, velvet, and ermine (the Archdruid's breastplate was designed to choke him, Herkomer said, if he gave a false judgement)."

In 1873, at Watford, Herkomer married Anna Caroline Ada Weise. A son, Siegfried Hubert, was born in 1875 and a daughter, Elsa Anna Iole, the next year. His first wife died in Vienna in 1883. In 1884, Herkomer married Eliza Louisa Griffiths, aged 35, known as Lulu, at Ruthin. She died a year later in child-birth. He then married a third wife, Maggie Griffiths, the sister of Lulu, also from Ruthin.

In 1888, Herkomer's father, Lorenz Herkomer, died at Watford aged 73. The next year, Herkomer's third wife gave birth to a son who was named Lorenz Hans Lawrence. In 1893, they had a daughter, Gwenddydd.

Herkomer died at Budleigh Salterton on 31 March 1914 and was buried in the churchyard beside St James's Church, Bushey.