School of Art

Contact Details

School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk


Display artist/maker:

Emily Mary Osborn

Born: 1828, UK, England, London, Kentish Town   Died: 1925, UK, England, London, St John's Wood

Painter. Daughter of a clergyman, Edward Osborn (1794-1859). Studied for three months at Mr Dickinson's Academy, Maddox Street, under John Mogford (1821-1885) and James Matthew Leigh (1808-1860). She withdrew from the Academy to study privately under Leigh, eventually spending a year at Leigh's General Practical School of Art to study oil painting. Osborn's mother, Mary Bolland (c.1806–1868) had seemingly wanted to study art herself, and so it was likely her influence that encouraged Osborn into the profession. She specialised in portraits and genre paintings, often enhancing their titles with lines of the great romantic poets of the time; these were widely displayed at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Society of British Artists, and the Liverpool Academy among others. In the 1860s Osborn toured southern Germany and then travelled to Venice where she studied under Carl Theodore von Piloty (1826-1886) before returning to Munich. Her painting was interrupted by the death of her mother in 1868 and then by the Franco-Prussian War in which she and her sister nursed the wounded at Heidelberg, but by the early 1870s she was exhibiting once more in Munich. Returning to England in 1873, Osborn lived and worked in both London and Glasgow, continuing to exhibit widely across England and Scotland but not enjoying the same reputation as she had before the 1860s - it has been suggested that this is the result of Germanic influence on her work. One or more visits to north Africa in the 1880s prompted Osborn to focus on landscape, painting only the occasional portrait.

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker

A Xmas Incident in Paris PL3560 Prints1860s

Our Widowed Queen PL3559 Prints1860s




 
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