Robert Havell was an American landscape painter and engraver. He was placed within the group of American painters known as the Hudson River school.
Background
Robert Havell was born on November 25, 1793, at Reading, Berkshire, England, the son of Robert and Lydia (Phillips) Havell, into a famous family of English engravers. His father, however, seeking to force him into one of the learned professions, succeeded, in 1825, in driving him from home.
Career
Two years later, while in search of a paragon among engravers to execute the plates for Audubon’s Birds of America, the elder Havell discovered his son, a finished artist in aquatint, in the employ of Colnahgi & Company, publishers. Reconciliation followed and a partnership was formed; Robert, Junior, undertook the engraving and his father the coloring and printing of the huge “elephant folio” plates. In 1828 the partnership was dissolved. The fact that after his father’s death in 1832, Robert Havell dropped the “Junior” from his signature has led some writers to ascribe the Audubon plates to the elder man, whereas except for the first ten plates, executed by William Lizars of Edinburgh, Robert Havell, Jr. , was the sole engraver of this series. After the first, he was responsible for the coloring as well.
Assistants applied the first crude washes, but Havell’s brush laid the more salient tones, the delicate touches. Williams (post) notes that Havell largely overcame the limitations of his medium, securing not only the softness suited to bird plumage, but, by judicious use of etched and engraved lines, a crisp definition giving to bird and plant forms both delicacy and force. By deft use of feathering he secured soft gradations and telling accents and achieved “a chiaroscuro seldom, if ever, equalled in aquatint. ” To his genius, which reproduced both the scientific truth and the artistic charm of Audubon’s drawings, was due much of the extraordinary success of the work.
Havell, his courage as indomitable as Audubon’s, his temperament more equable, also did much to sustain the naturalist through the long struggle of publication, offering, too, considerable financial support. In appreciation Audubon in 1834 presented his engraver with a silver loving-cup. The following year Havell, with his wife and a daughter, followed Audubon to America and after staying with him for a time, and then in Brooklyn, settled at Sing Sing, now Ossining, on the Hudson. Here and at Tarrytown, where in 1857 he built a house and studio, he passed the remainder of his life, chiefly in painting and sketching for his own pleasure the scenery of the Washington Irving country, although he also engraved and published important views of the Hudson and of several American cities. Shortly before his death he exhibited some seventy-five canvases in oils, for which medium he had forsaken water color. He died within sight of his beloved Hudson and was buried in Sleepy Hollow.
Achievements
Connections
Havell married Amelia Jane Eddington, and they were the parents of two sons and two daughters.