Valentine Prinsep Biography

Valentine Cameron Prinsep RA (1838-1904) was a British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school.

Born in Calcutta, India, he was the second child of Henry Thoby Prinsep, a civil servant of the British Raj, and his wife Sara Monckton Pattle. His home was shared by the painter George Frederick Watts and the Little Holland House salon. His mother was a sister of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and Maria Jackson (née Pattle), grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Henry and Sara Prinsep returned to England in 1843. They settled in 1851 at Little Holland House, and made it a centre of artistic society.

Valentine first studied with George Watts and travelled with him in 1856–57 to Sir Charles Thomas Newton's excavation of Halicarnassus. Valentine then went to Charles Gleyre's atelier in Paris. There, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Poynter, and George du Maurier were among his fellow students. 

Prinsep was a close friend of John Everett Millais, and of Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled further in Italy. He had a share with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union. With other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he taught at the Working Men's College during the mid-19th century. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1862 with his Bianca Capella, his first picture, which attracted notice as a portrait (1866) of General Gordon in Chinese costume. Prinsep lent the costume to Millais who used it in his own painting Esther.

From 1862 to his death Prinsep was an annual exhibitor at the Royal Academy. He was elected A.R.A. in 1879 and R.A. in 1894. His marriage in 1884 to Florence Leyland, daughter of Frederick Richards Leyland and 23 years his junior, made Prinsep a wealthy man, and he became a company director and landowner.

He was an enthusiastic volunteer and one of the founders of the Artists Rifles in 1859.

Prinsep died at Holland Park, west London in 1904, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.