Richard St John Tyrwhitt

Richard St John Tyrwhitt (19 March 1827 – 6 December 1895) was an English cleric and author. He was known as a writer on art.

Richard St John Tyrwhitt, 1857 photograph by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

Early life

Tyrwhitt was born on 19 March 1827.[1] He was the eldest son of Robert Philip Tyrwhitt (1798–1886), a police magistrate, and his wife Catherine Wigley, daughter of Henry St. John.[1] He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford on 15 May 1845, was a student from 1845 to 1859, tutor from 1852 to 1856, and rhetoric reader in 1856.[1] He graduated with a B.A. in 1849 and an M.A. in 1852.[1]

Career

In 1851, Tyrwitt was ordained.[1] From 1858 to 1872, he held the vicarage of St Mary Magdalen's Church, Oxford.[1] In 1857, Tyrwhitt assisted William Morris in painting the roof of the Oxford Union Society.[2]

Tyrwhitt was an admirer of John Ruskin, in whose favour he withdrew his candidature for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art in 1869.[1]

During the contested 1877 election for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, Tyrwhitt attacked John Addington Symonds, a candidate, in a piece "The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature" in the Contemporary Review.[3] The argument also took in Benjamin Jowett, suspected of unorthodox religious views; Symonds found it telling, and withdrew his candidacy shortly before the election.[4] Tyrwhitt's piece has been characterised as homophobic, and caused the withdrawal of Walter Pater too.[5][6] Also in the Contemporary Review, he argued in 1878 that belief in evolution was compatible with Christianity, and that John Tyndall was incorrect in thinking otherwise.[7]

Tyrwhitt's friendship with John Henry Parker led Tyrwhitt into the debate over the Roman catacombs and their significance. He tried to keep to a middle, non-sectarian way of interpretation, following Henry Reeve, with emphasis on the evidence of growth of early Christianity.[8]

Works

Tyrwhitt was the author of A Handbook of Pictorial Art (1866; 2nd edit. 1868): it was adopted by the Science and Art Department as a textbook.[9] In addition to sermons, he published also:[1]

  • Concerning Clerical Powers and Duties, 1861.
  • Fragments, 1867. Poems.[10]
  • Christian Art and Symbolism, with Hints on the Study of Landscape, 1872 (preface by Ruskin).
  • The Art Teaching of the Primitive Church, 1874.
  • Our Sketching Club: Letters and Studies in Landscape Art, with a Reproduction of the Lessons and Woodcuts in Ruskin's "Elements of Drawing", 1874. Unfavourably reviewed by William Bell Scott, it caused a controversy between Scott and Ruskin.[11]
  • Hugh Heron, Ch. Ch.: an Oxford Novel, 1880.
  • Greek and Gothic: Progress and Decay in the three Arts of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1881.
  • The Natural Theology of Natural Beauty, 1882.
  • Christian Ideals and Hopes: an Argument from Moral Beauty, 1883.
  • An Amateur Art Book: Lectures, 1886.
  • Free Field Lyrics, chiefly descriptive, 1888.

To Francis Galton's Vacation Tourists, 1864, Tyrwhitt contributed an account of a visit to Sinai. He exhibited watercolours at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street Gallery.[1] He also painted murals, for example in the Oxford Museum.[12]

Tyrwhitt wrote for periodicals, for example on art criticism in the Contemporary Review.[13] He also contributed to the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,[14] and to the Dictionary of Christian Biography.[15]

Personal life

Tyrwhitt married, first, on 28 June 1858, Eliza Ann, daughter of John Spencer Stanhope of Cannon Hall, Yorkshire.[1] She died on 8 September 1859, leaving a son, Walter Spencer Stanhope, a lieutenant in the Warwick militia.[1] By a second marriage, on 2 January 1861, to Caroline (died 1883), youngest daughter of John Yorke of Bewerley Hall, Yorkshire, he had six children.[1]

Between 1864 and 1880, Tywhitt exhibited two watercolours at the Royal Academy and two at the Suffolk Street Gallery.[1] He was accounted a member of the Guild of St George in 1876.[16] He was a member of the committee for the decoration of St Paul's Cathedral.[1]

Tyrwhitt died at 62 Banbury Road, Oxford, on 6 December 1895.[1] and was buried in Holywell Cemetery.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Tyrwhitt, Richard St. John" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 57. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  2. ↑ Henderson, Philip (1973). William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends. Middlesex: Penguin Books. p. 64.
  3. ↑ Richard Dellamora (1 January 1990). Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. UNC Press Books. p. 162. ISBN 978-0-8078-4267-6.
  4. ↑ Linda Dowling (9 September 2014). Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Cornell University Press. pp. 91–2. ISBN 978-0-8014-6873-5.
  5. ↑ Colleen Lamos (10 December 1998). Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Cambridge University Press. p. 234 note 22. ISBN 978-1-139-42573-5.
  6. ↑ P. Th. M. G. Liebregts; Wim Tigges (1996). Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, R.L. Stevenson and Their Contemporaries. Rodopi. p. 118. ISBN 90-5183-902-2.
  7. ↑ Cantor (12 March 2004). Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-century Periodicals. MIT Press. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-262-26218-7.
  8. ↑ David Gange; Michael Ledger-Lomas (17 October 2013). Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press. p. 298. ISBN 978-1-107-51191-0.
  9. ↑ Stuart Macdonald (1 January 2004). The History and Philosophy of Art Education. James Clarke & Co. p. 266. ISBN 978-0-7188-9153-4.
  10. ↑ Catherine Reilly (2000). Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879. A&C Black. p. 472. ISBN 978-0-7201-2318-0.
  11. ↑ William Morris (14 July 2014). The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volume I: 1848-1880. Princeton University Press. p. 247 note 5. ISBN 978-1-4008-5618-3.
  12. ↑ Cynthia Gamble (1 January 2008). John Ruskin, Henry James and the Shropshire Lads. Cynthia Gamble. p. 171. ISBN 978-1-872410-68-5.
  13. ↑ E. M. Palmegiano (15 October 2013). Perceptions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals: A Bibliography. Anthem Press. p. 130. ISBN 978-1-84331-756-2.
  14. ↑ William Smith; Samuel Cheetham (1 January 2005). Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (in 9 Volumes). Concept Publishing Company. p. xii. ISBN 978-81-7268-111-1.
  15. ↑ William Smith; Henry Wace (1882). "A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines". Internet Archive. p. x. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
  16. ↑ Mark Frost (1 August 2014). The Lost Companions and John Ruskin's Guild of St George: A Revisionary History. Anthem Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-1-78308-283-4.

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Tyrwhitt, Richard St. John". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 57. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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