Background
Clint was born in Brownlow Street, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, London, the son of Michael Clint, a hairdresser in Lombard Street. He married the daughter of a small farmer in Berkshire. They had five sons and four daughters.
Clint was born in Brownlow Street, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, London, the son of Michael Clint, a hairdresser in Lombard Street. He married the daughter of a small farmer in Berkshire. They had five sons and four daughters.
He went to school in Yorkshire and was then apprenticed to a fishmonger, but left after a violent dispute with his employer.
He found alternative employment in an attorney"s office, but took exception to the work and became a house-painter instead - one of his jobs was painting the stones of the arches in the nave of Westminster Abbey. He also decorated the exterior of a house built by Sir Christopher Wren in Cheapside, and was later employed by the bookseller Thomas Tegg. Clint took up Portrait miniature painting.
He had a studio in Leadenhall Street, and he became acquainted with the publisher John Bell, whose nephew, the mezzotint engraver Edward Bell, taught Clint the art of engraving.
At this period Samuel Reynolds, the engraver, advised him to undertake watercolour portraits. Commissions proving scarce, he made copies, in colour, from prints after George Morland and Teniers.
He reproduced Morland"s The Enraged Bulletin and The Horse struck by Lightning several times. Around 1816, his studio at 83 Gower Street, was a meeting place of the leading actors and actresses of the day.
This popularity arose from a series of dramatic scenes which he painted, such as "William Farren, Farley, and Jones as Lord Ogleby, Canton, and Brush" in the comedy The Clandestine Marriage.
Clint was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1821, a position he resigned in 1836, after repeated disappointments in not being made a full academician. He subsequently took a house in Peckham, but moved to Pembroke Square, where he died on 10 May 1864. One of Clint"s sons, Scipio Clint, was a notable medallist and seal engraver.