1. John Opie was a Cornish historical and portrait painter.
18 Facts About John Opie
1. 2.
John Opie painted many great men and women of his day, including members of the British Royal Family, and others who were notable in the artistic and literary professions.
3.
John Opie was the youngest of the five children of Edward Opie, a master carpenter, and his wife Mary.
4.
John Opie showed a precocious talent for drawing and mathematics, and by the age of twelve, he had mastered Euclid and opened an evening school for poor children where he taught reading, writing, and arithmetic.
5.
John Opie's father did not encourage his abilities, and apprenticed him to his own trade of carpentry.
6.
In 1781, having gained considerable experience as a portraitist travelling around Cornwall, John Opie moved to London with Wolcot.
7.
The business arrangement with Wolcot lasted for a year, after which John Opie informed the doctor that he now wished to go it alone, leading to the estrangement of the two former partners.
8.
John Opie received commissions to paint Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, both the nephew and son-in-law of the King.
9.
John Opie painted the portraits of Lady Salisbury, Lady Charlotte Talbot, Lady Harcourt and other ladies of the court.
10.
In 1799, John Opie painted a portrait of Charlotte, Princess Royal, daughter of George III.
11.
John Opie painted five subjects for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery; and until his death, his practice alternated between portraiture and historical work.
12.
John and Amelia lived at 8 Berners Street, London where Opie had moved in 1791.
13.
John Opie painted the portrait of Captain Mark Oates whom he had seen paint a butterfly when both men were young.
14.
John Opie painted her portrait between 1790 and 1800, and asked for her hand in marriage around 1796, but her father rejected the marriage.
15.
In 1805, John Opie was appointed a professor at the Royal Academy and from May 1806 gave a series of four lectures which were published as a book after his death, with a memoir by his widow Amelia John Opie, in 1809.
16.
John Opie was known as a writer on art by his Life of Reynolds in Wolcot's edition of Matthew Pilkington's Dictionary of Painters and his Letter on the Cultivation of the Fine Arts in England, in which he advocated the formation of a national gallery.
17.
John Opie died in April 1807, aged 45, at his home in Berners Street, and was buried at St Paul's Cathedral, in the crypt next to Joshua Reynolds, as he had wished.
18.
An exhaustive list of John Opie's exhibited works, private commissions etc.