Background
Henry Bryan Hall was born on March 11, 1808, in London, England.
Henry Bryan Hall was born on March 11, 1808, in London, England.
Benjamin Smith, one of the engravers of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, taught Henry the use of the burin when the boy was articled to him at fourteen. Later Hall helped on plates after Sir Thomas Lawrence, under tutelage of the painter’s chosen engraver, Henry Meyer.
Hall's first employment after finishing his apprenticeship was with H. T. Ryall, historical engraver to the Crown, with whom he worked four years executing the portrait work in the “Coronation of Queen Victoria, ” from the crowded canvas by Sir George Hayter. Self-taught, possibly, by his close study of the portrait canvases he engraved, he developed during his London career considerable ability as a portrait painter. He had notable sitters, among them Napoleon III. Later, in America, he painted two brother artists, Thomas Sully and Charles Loring Elliott. He also painted miniatures on ivory.
In 1850 Hall emigrated to America with his namesake, leaving the rest of the family to follow within the year. He came well-introduced, and on his arrival in New York had no difficulty in securing ample commissions for portrait engraving for various publishers.
He had already taught his younger brother, George R. Hall (who followed him to America), to engrave, and gradually initiated three of his sons and his daughter Alice into the art, in which they had some individual success.
At the close of the Civil War, when the rage for likenesses of soldier heroes inaugurated, according to Weitenkampf, a period of “rank commercialism, ” Hall went into business with his sons, Henry Bryan Hall, Jr. , Alfred Bryan Hall, and Charles B. Hall. The firm, known as H. B. Hall & Sons, had a large business in the engraving and publishing of portraits. After the death of the senior member in 1884, the firm was continued as H. B. Hall Sons and from 1899 was carried on by Charles B. Hall alone. He died after a paralytic stroke, in Morrisania, New York. His collection of prints and water colors, including many from his own hand, was sold in 1885.
Henry Hall was a well-known artist of his time, who devoted his personal skill largely to the engraving and etching of portraits of American historical personages, Revolutionary heroes, signers of the Declaration of Independence, many of which were private plates executed for such collectors as Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet of New York and Francis S. Hoffman of Philadelphia. Among his best plates were portraits of Washington, of which he engraved not less than twelve, after Trumbull, Stuart, Sharpless, and Peale.
Henry Hall married in England and lived in a series of dull London suburbs - Stepney Holloway, Camden Town - where several children were born to him.
