(1805 - 1876)
Painter of animals, landscape, genre, Spanish and oriental subjects John Frederick Lewis was the son of artist Frederick Christian Lewis. He studied under Edwin Landseer, exhibiting at the British Institution from 1820 and Royal Academy in 1821. He turned to watercolours in c.1825 and was elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society (1829). He made visits to Switzerland (1827), Italy and Spain (1832/34) and Paris (1837), before continuing to Rome, Constantinople, Greece and the Middle East, arriving in Cairo in 1841 and remaining for about ten years. Lewis’s watercolour ‘The Hhareem’ (c.1850) helped establish him as England’s chief orientalist artist. He was elected President of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1855 and RA in 1865.
