Eyre crowe memorandum 1907

Eyre Crowe was born in Sloane Street, London, the first of the five children of the journalist and historian Eyre Evans Crowe Nearly all of his childhood was spent in France, where his father became the Paris correspondent of the Morning Chronicle , and the family home "became the centre of a liberal and artistic circle of both French people and expatriates" Summerwill , and where he first met William Makepeace Thackeray.

He was still a boy then, and enjoyed the company of the author, who was good at keeping children amused. His own talent was for painting, and, at the young age of 14, he entered the highly prestigious atelier of the French artist Paul Delaroche.

Una crowe

Later on, he attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts too. When Delaroche went to Rome in , he took three of his pupils, including Crowe, with him. Crowe's mother, sisters and youngest brother George also went to Rome, but the family was reunited in Hampstead in the following year, when his father became a leader-writer for the Morning Chronicle.

Here, despite all his previous training, Crowe entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he was friendly with future members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. More important for his future career, as it turned out, was the fact that Thackeray now took him under his wing. Eyre was still finding it hard to make a name for himself as an artist.

According to his Times obituary, he "wrote rather better than he painted," so when his father became editor of the Daily News in , he was taken on as the paper's art critic. Crowe remained with him when his father took his wife and younger children back to France in , and then accompanied the novelist on his six-month lecture tour of America — an experience he recorded in With Thackeray in America After this, Crowe's inspiration and career as a painter both began to pick up.

He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and Kathryn Summerwill writes of "a remarkable year unbroken period during which at least one of his pictures graced the walls of the Academy in each year. By now, Eyre had acquired a solid standing in the art world. He was also one of the artists chosen to decorate the future Victoria and Albert Museum, designing for example the mosaics of Hogarth and Sir Christopher Wren for the south courts see Hopson , and advising on its art acquisitions.