Albert Joseph Moore in about 1870
Hull Rd, York YO10 5ZA, United Kingdom
The modern Learning Centre of the Archbishop Holgate's School where Albert Joseph Moore did his studies.
Clifton, York YO30 6AB, United Kingdom
St. Peter's School, York, where Albert Joseph Moore did his studies.
The old building of the Kensington Proprietary Grammar School which Albert Joseph Moore attended from 1855 to 1858.
Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, United Kingdom
The Royal Academy of Arts where Albert Joseph Moore studied for a few months in 1858.
Hull Rd, York YO10 5ZA, United Kingdom
The modern Learning Centre of the Archbishop Holgate's School where Albert Joseph Moore did his studies.
The old building of the Kensington Proprietary Grammar School which Albert Joseph Moore attended from 1855 to 1858.
Clifton, York YO30 6AB, United Kingdom
St. Peter's School, York, where Albert Joseph Moore did his studies.
Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, United Kingdom
The Royal Academy of Arts where Albert Joseph Moore studied for a few months in 1858.
Henry Moore
Architect and designer William Eden Nesfield, one of Moore's mentors
Albert Joseph Moore was born on September 4, 1841 in York, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. He was the thirteenth child of fourteen kids in the family of William Moore, a portraitist and landscapist pretty famous in the North of England at one time, and his second wife Sarah Collingham.
At least four of Moore's brothers were painters, including John Collingham Moore and Henry Moore, R.A., a well-known marine artist.
Raised in an artistic family, Albert Joseph Moore revealed his interest in art at a very early age. First trained in art by his father-painter, Moore received classical education at the Archbishop's Holgate School and later at St. Peter's School in York. After the death of his father in 1851, Moore was mentored in painting by his elder brother, an artist John Collingham Moore.
In May 1853, Albert's academic achievements were marked by a gold medal from the Department of Arts and Sciences at Kensington. Two years later, he entered the Kensington Proprietary Grammar School in London where he studied till his admission to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1858. Simeon Solomon and William Blake Richmond were among his contemporaries at the institution. After only a few months of studies, Moore dropped out of the Academy and concentrated on independent practice.
In 1859, while in France, Albert Joseph Moore was apprenticed to an architect William Eden Nesfield.
The start of Albert Joseph Moore's career can be counted from 1857, when a couple of his drawings, A Goldfinch and A Woodcock, were demonstrated at the Royal Academy of Arts. His early works showed signs of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. He was also inspired by John Ruskin, as can be seen in his Study of an Ash Trunk, and by Madox Brown and Bell Scott, whose style he followed in a religious canvas Eliyah's Sacrifice. Other religious works, The Mother of Sisera Looked Out of a Window and Elijah Running to Jezreel before Ahab's Chariot, were also among his major early creations.
Although Moore continued to produce and regularly exhibit many paintings and drawings throughout the 1860s, he concentrated mainly on decorative craft of different kinds. He elaborated design for tiles, wallpaper and stained glass of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., and completed a number of works as an ecclesiastic and domestic mural painter. The major projects in the area include wall decorations at Coombe Abbey, The Last Supper and The Feeding of the Five Thousand for the chancel walls of the church of St. Alban's, Rochdale, and a 1868 tempera panel A Greek Play for the proscenium of the Queen's Theatre in Long Acre.
It was also the time when Moore immersed himself in a detailed exploration of antique sculpture, notably the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. The investigations brought some neo-classicism to his works, like abundance of floral decorations, draping cloth on female figures and light subtle colors, the essential elements of all his subsequent paintings.
In 1864-1865, Moore demonstrated some of his decorative works, a fresco group The Seasons, and fully decorative picture The Marble Seat, at the Royal Academy. From 1877, he regularly exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery.
Albert Joseph Moore remained active till the end of his life despite an incurable illness at the time. His last work, The Loves of the Seasons and the Winds, produced for Mr. McCulloch, dates to the year of the painter's death. The picture was accompanied by three stanzas of verse written by Moore himself.
Albert Joseph Moore's decorative paintings filled with harmony and pure but elegant colors and placing female figures in the center of the composition gained him prominence as a founder of the Aesthetic Movement, brand-new for the Victorian art. An outstanding painter of drapery, he had few real followers who achieved such mastery of decorative techniques in fine arts.
Moore was extremely popular among true art admirers as his pictures belonged to elite art, and not to the mass one. Although he had no worries about selling his works, he found so called direct patrons only close to the end of his life.
Nowadays, Moore's artistic legacy is in many public and private collections of the United Kingdom, including the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the National Gallery of British Art, the Liverpool Corporation Gallery and the Birmingham Corporation Gallery.
Battledore
A Sleeping Girl
Elijah's Sacrifice
Seagulls
Pansies
A Venus
Apples
The Mother of Sisera Looked out of a Window
Topaz
Shuttlecock
Midsummer
Reclining Model
William Connal, Jr. Esq. of Solsgirth
A Reverie
A Workbasket
Apricots
Blossoms
Azaleas
An Idyll
The Gilded Fan
Study for Birds
A Reader
A Study in Yellow
Silver
Amber
Pomegranates
A Garland
Jasmine
Loves of the Seasons and the Winds
Sapphires
A Summer Night
Dreamers
An Open Book
Seashells
Dancing Girl Resting
A Garden
Hairpins
A Musician
Joseph Marigolds
The End of the Story
The Shulamite
Albert Joseph Moore was not an archaeological painter who aspired to reconstruct the life of the past in great detail. The world he created on his canvases was no more than a reflection of his strong admiration of and adherence to the antique culture as well as of his belief in the beauty of simplicity. The idea can be proved by the titles he gave to his creations. Deprived of any hidden meaning, they were defined by the mood of a particular completed work.
Albert Joseph Moore was made an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolor (currently the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors) in 1844.
Albert Joseph Moore was independent in his judgments whether it was art or social questions. Such a frankness in views was a possible cause of his rejection to the ranks of the Royal Academy where he was however a frequent exhibitor.
Albert Joseph Moore's family life is a mistery. There is no information on whether he was married or had children.
(born 1790 – died 1851)
As an artist, William Moore dealt with portraits and landscapes.
(née Collingham; born 1797 – died 1863)
(born 7 March 1831 – died 22 June 1895)
Henry Moore was a British marine and landscape artist.
(born 1829 – died 12 July 1880)
John Collingham Moore was a British artist active in the Victorian era. He dealt with landscapes and portraits.
(born 11 July 1834 – died 17 July 1903)
Whistler was an American painter, etcher and lithographer, known for his paintings of nocturnal London, striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits and brilliant etchings and lithographs.
(born 3 December 1830 – died 25 January 1896)
Leighton was a British painter of the late 19th century, and one of the pre-eminent artists of the Victorian period. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history.
(born 1858 – died 18 May 1939)
A pupil of Albert Joseph Moore, Baldry became his biographer after the artist's death. Baldry also authored a biography of another painter, a German-born British Hubert von Herkomer.
(born 2 April 1835 – died 25 March 1888)
Nesfield was as a British architect, designer and painter. Active in the 1860s and 1870s, he left behind a legacy of several houses in Old English and Queen Anne style.
