Charlotte Schreiber

1834 (age 88)

Essex, England

Schreiber exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of only 21. Schreiber was the first female elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The National Gallery of Canada holds the painting that she submitted toward her Academy diploma. Titled The Croppy Boy (The Confession of an Irish Patriot), it is based on the Irish ballad "The Croppy Boy", which was popular during the Irish rebellion of the 1790s. lieutenant tells the story of a youth who stops in a church to confess his sins as he prepares for the battle of Wexford. His audience, however, is not a Catholic priest, but a disguised British soldier who arrests him and takes him for execution. The painting shows the youth on his knees, earnestly addressing the cloaked soldier, whose uniform is visible to the viewer but not to the penitent. The two figures are united by the red in their clothing, but the soldier occupies the shadowy portion of the canvas, with the youth on the lighter side, perhaps suggesting Schreiber"s sympathies. Her art was influenced by literature, including her early illustrations of poems by Chaucer (The Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene, illustrated 1871), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Rhyme of the Duchess May, 1874).

Charlotte Schreiber

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painter

Background

Schreiber, née Morrell, was born in Essex, England.

Education

She initially studied at an art school in London with a teacher who had a background in surgery, which informed her careful observation of, and interest in, the human form: she wrote in 1895, "The human hand, the finger nail, the foot, every portion of the living body, the parts of a flower, are divinely beautiful … it is a joy to paint them as they are in reality". She later studied under John Rogers Herbert, a member of the British Royal Academy of Artist

Career

Schreiber exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of only 21. Schreiber was the first female elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The National Gallery of Canada holds the painting that she submitted toward her Academy diploma.

Titled The Croppy Boy (The Confession of an Irish Patriot), it is based on the Irish ballad "The Croppy Boy", which was popular during the Irish rebellion of the 1790s.

lieutenant tells the story of a youth who stops in a church to confess his sins as he prepares for the battle of Wexford. His audience, however, is not a Catholic priest, but a disguised British soldier who arrests him and takes him for execution.

The painting shows the youth on his knees, earnestly addressing the cloaked soldier, whose uniform is visible to the viewer but not to the penitent. The two figures are united by the red in their clothing, but the soldier occupies the shadowy portion of the canvas, with the youth on the lighter side, perhaps suggesting Schreiber"s sympathies.

Her art was influenced by literature, including her early illustrations of poems by Chaucer (The Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene, illustrated 1871), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Rhyme of the Duchess May, 1874).

Membership

She was soon appointed a board member of the Ontario School of Art, and was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists (1876–1889).

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