Career
Herdman was a self-taught painter who started sketching in his early teens, documenting the city of Liverpool, making notes about how the city and its buildings were changing as the city grew. Herdman painted around 2,000 watercolours of Liverpool scenes which were included in the book, Herdman’s Liverpool which appeared in several editions after his death in 1882. Herdman is best known as a landscape painter, typically of scenes around Liverpool.
Herdman exhibited landscapes at the Royal Academy from 1834 to 1861.
He joined the Liverpool Academy of s in 1836. In 1857 he left the Liverpool Academy over their annual award to Sir John Everett Millais for his The Blind Girl.
Because of conflicts within the ist Community, both Academies closed by 1870. Herdman was a teacher and a successful commercial artist.
He took commissions and after completing a series of paintings of scenes around Liverpool, which were also used to illustrate Herdman"s books
The Pictorial Relics of Ancient Liverpool contained 62 drawings on 49 plates, which he published in 1843 and 1856. Other publications include A Treatise of Curvilinear Perspectives and its applications to published in 1854 and Thoughts on Speculative cosmology and the principles of published in 1870.