Benjamin Williams Leader R.A. 1831-1923

Frank Lewis, Benjamin William Leader, R.A. 1831-1923, 1971, p. 42;

Ruth Wood, Benjamin William Leader, R.A. 1831-1923, His Life and Paintings, 1998, p. 129

Benjamin Williams Leader came from the well-known Williams family of artists. In 1857 he transposed his names taking Leader as his surname in 1857, to distinguish himself from the many other artist members of the Williams family. His father Edward Leader Williams was engineer to the Severn Navigation Commission – a fact that may explain Leader’s particular fondness in later life for river and canal subjects. He was educated at the Worcester grammar school, and subsequently at the Government School of Design in the town.

In 1854 Leader enrolled at the Royal Academy School, where he encountered the influence of contemporary Pre-Raphaelitism. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1854 – his early exhibited paintings being domestic and genre subjects treated with meticulous attention to detail and local colour. In 1856, a landscape painting of Leader’s was bought from the Birmingham Society of Artists by Frederick William Hulme – himself a landscape painter – and thus he was encouraged to specialise in landscape subjects. In 1857 Leader’s A Stream from the Hills was referred to by John Ruskin in Academy Notes as ‘elaborate and valuable’. A diary entry for 1859, in which Leader records that he was then striving ‘faithfully and simply [to] copy nature’, indicates his allegiance to Ruskinian principles in his early career.

In 1862 Leader settled at Whittington, near Worcester, and embarked on the familiar pattern of his professional life, sending landscape paintings each year to the summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, and gaining a steadily rising reputation as one of the leading landscape painters of his generation. The Worcestershire countryside formed his principal subject matter, but he also made frequent painting expeditions to North Wales. Later on landscape subjects painted in Surrey regularly occur among his exhibited works. Gradually the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism passed from his work, as he inclined to wider perspectives and more distant views of the landscape, and as he found himself drawn to effects of atmosphere and the quality of light at morning and evening. Leader may consciously have sought to emulate John Constable (who, it was said, Leader’s father had known). Certainly the breadth and balance of composition of Leader’s later paintings place him within a long landscape tradition, and his works were often praised for their recognisably English character. In his 1901 Art Annual essay describing Leader’s work, Lewis Lusk wrote of ‘his careful retention of the picturesque, his style of arranging his masses, his selection of cloud effects, his peculiarly poetic strain of the Lyric order, which so often makes his canvas an illustration of some choice verse of an English poet – there is sufficient likelihood that these qualities of his work will always ensure respect and study from many a maturing mind. They are all inherent in the national character.’

Leader became famous on the strength of one particular painting – February Fill-Dyke (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), which he showed to acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1881. This was followed by a series of further successes of a similar character, including In the Evening there shall be Light (Royal Academy 1882) – the painting that led to his being elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy. At the same time Leader gained a reputation in Europe, showing In the Evening there shall be Light at the Paris Salon in 1889 and winning a gold medal for it. Although the Royal Academy was less than favourably disposed to landscape specialists, an exception was made in Leader’s case – his works being willingly admitted to the summer exhibitions, and in 1898 he was made a full member of the Academy.

The precise location of the present view is not identified, but it is more than likely that it represents the Worcestershire countryside. The village of Whittington, where Leader lived and from which he explored the neighbouring countryside, is on the flat land between the rivers Severn and Avon, to the south of Worcester. To the Southwest, however, from this location, are visible the Malvern Hills, while to the Southeast is Bredon Hill. Leader’s A Summer Day shows a peaceful and beautiful English landscape. On the far horizon appear distant hills, as he might have seen from his own home.