Briton Rivière canvas print: one work in museum quality, made to order in the size you choose, with optional framing.
Briton Rivière (1840-1920) was a British painter of Huguenot descent, best known for his animal pictures. Dogs, lions and other creatures share his canvases with figures from myth, the Bible and everyday Victorian life, and he spent most of his career on such subjects.
He was born in London into a family of artists. His grandfather Daniel Valentine Rivière painted, his uncle Henry Parsons Rivière exhibited watercolors in London and Birmingham, and another uncle, Robert Rivière, made his name as a bookbinder. His father, William Rivière, taught drawing at Cheltenham College and later art at Oxford, and nearly all of Briton's artistic training came from him. The son also studied at Cheltenham College and then at Oxford, where he graduated in 1867. He had shown pictures at the British Institution as early as 1851 and 1852, still a child, and in 1857 three of his works hung at the Royal Academy.
Between 1860 and 1863 his future brother-in-law, the painter Clarence Dobell, drew him toward the Pre-Raphaelites. The results did not please the Academy, which rejected his Elaine on the Barge and Hamlet and Ophelia. From 1863 he exhibited there every year, first with history and literary scenes such as The Eve of the Spanish Armada and, in 1864, Romeo and Juliet. In 1865 he turned decisively to animals with Sleeping Deerhound. He also earned a reputation as an illustrator, starting with drawings for the satirical magazine Punch.
In 1867 Rivière married Mary Alice Dobell, Clarence's sister, herself a painter who showed briefly at the Royal Academy around 1869. The couple first lived in Keston and Bromley in Kent before settling in London in 1871. They had seven children; their son Hugh Goldwin Rivière became a portrait painter, and another son, Evelyn, married the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, known as a translator of Freud. In London Rivière belonged to a circle of Scottish painters that included William Quiller Orchardson, John Pettie, Peter Graham and John MacWhirter.
The 1870s brought his best-known works. Circe and the Friends of Ulysses (1871) shows the sorceress among the men she has turned into swine, Argus (1873) the dog who alone recognizes Odysseus on his return, and War Time (1874) belongs to the same years. Pallas Athena and the Herdsman's Dogs followed in 1876, and Sympathy, around 1878, shows a girl sitting on a staircase with a dog pressed close to her. Later came A Roman Holiday (1881), with a gladiator and lions in the arena, Requiescat (1888), a dead knight lying in state watched by his dog, and Prometheus (1889).
In an interview for the boys' annual Chums, Rivière described his methods. He said he loved dogs but had painted so many that he no longer wanted them around him, though no one could paint a dog without liking it. He always worked with a handler who knew animals, and found collies, greyhounds and fox terriers especially hard to keep still. For wild animals he built up large numbers of studies; he painted from carcasses as well as living creatures, once keeping the body of a lioness in his studio, and dissected regularly at the Zoological Gardens.
The Royal Academy elected him an Associate and soon after a full Academician. Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate in 1891 and Oriel College an honorary fellowship in 1910. When Sir John Everett Millais died in 1896, Rivière lost the election for his successor as President of the Academy by a narrow margin. Hubert von Herkomer painted his portrait in 1887, and Edward Onslow Ford modeled a bronze bust of him. Two weeks before his death in April 1920 he sent the Academy his last picture, an old shepherd with his dog, titled Michael.
After his death his widow gave four of his drawings and an etching to the British Museum, which also holds many prints after his paintings by engravers such as Frederick Stacpoole and William Henry Simmons. His pictures hang today in Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Ashmolean Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.
