Briton Riviere was a British artist of Huguenot descent. He was best known as an animal painter, but also painted some striking genre and history paintings, often including animals.
Background
Briton Riviere was born in London on August 14, 1840. He came from an artistic family of Huguenot descent: his grandfather was a student at the Royal Academy Schools, as was his father, William Riviere, who went on to become a drawing-master at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire.
Education
Young Briton, who had already started sketching animals at London Zoo, and in 1851 exhibited oil paintings of kittens at the British Institution, was educated at Cheltenham from 1851 to 1859. In 1857, when still at school, he had three paintings accepted by the Royal Academy ("Death of Mr Briton Riviere").
At this point his father moved to Oxford, where he established art as an area of study within the university. Having moved there with his family in 1859, Riviere went on to take his BA and MA degrees at St Mary Hall, Oxford. His connection with St Mary's continued and stood him in good stead: he would be granted the honorary degree of DCL (Doctor of Civil Law) in 1891, and later still an honorary fellowship at Oriel College, with which St Mary Hall was associated.
Career
As a young man, Riviere came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and Millais. But after his promising start, success proved elusive, and he had to diversify by taking on illustrative work — not that this was necessarily a step down, since so many important artists at this time were producing illustrations. However, in his case it included making decorative initials for Punch, which was perhaps not what he had expected to be doing. Applying himself to animal painting, and studying with the Scottish painters John Pettie and Sir William Quiller Orchardson, both helped him to firmer ground: "A sequence of animal paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy assured his growing fame" (Reynolds), particularly because they were often engraved.
In 1878 he was elected Associate of the Royal Academy, and in 1880 became a full Academician. After Millais' death in 1896, he only just missed being voted president of the Academy (Sir Edward Poynter won the vote by a narrow margin), although, as Simon Reynolds points out, this was an honour that he would probably not have enjoyed, since he was of "retiring disposition." The same point was made in his Times obituary. Later on, too, his failing eyesight would have been a problem.
As an animal-painter, Riviere "tended to imbue his animals with para-human character", and did not always escape sentimentality — although he could be humorous as well. While animals did generally feature in his works, his skills were not at all limited to them. At his best, he could produce "a most happy combination of classic lore and animal painting", and in later years he became interested in the idea of evolution and was drawn to create wild landscapes like Beyond Man's Footsteps, very different from his popular scenes of children with their pets.
Riviere died on April 20, 1920 at 82 Finchley Road and was cremated at Golders Green three days later.
Quotations:
"I have always been a great lover of dogs but I have worked at them so much that I've grown tired of having them about me. However, you can never paint a dog unless you are fond of it. I never work from a dog without the assistance of a man who is well acquainted with animals ... Collies, I think, are the most restless dogs ...greyhounds are also very restless, and so are fox terriers ... The only way to paint wild animals is to gradually accumulate a large number of studies and a great knowledge of the animal itself, before you can paint its picture ... I paint from dead animals as well as from live ones. I have had the body of a fine lioness in my studio ... I have done a great deal of work in the dissecting rooms at the Zoological Gardens from time to time."
Connections
He married a sister of the poet Sydney Dobell, Mary Alice Rivière. They had seven children; five sons and two daughters.