Herbert James Draper Biography

Draper was a painter of powerful and sensuous imaginative paintings who enjoyed considerable success around 1900. However, Draper paintings have been little studied, because his fluent academic draftsmanship, the result of a training received in Paris, rapidly became unfashionable in the 20th century. Draper's merits are only now being reassessed.
Draper was born in London and educated at the St. John’s Wood Art School and, from 1884, at the Royal Academy Schools. Draper won the Royal Academy Travelling Scholarship in 1889 and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and in Rome. Draper had already begun to exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy, and showed there regularly between 1887 and his death. A number of Draper paintings were bought for the recently founded British provincial art galleries and may be found in Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Preston, Truro and Hull. In 1898, his ‘Lament for Icarus’ (Tate Gallery, London) was bought from the Royal Academy exhibition by the Chantrey Bequest, the most important public fund for purchasing modern art and in 1900 this painting gained a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle. At about the same time, Herbert James Draper received an important mural commission for the ceiling of the Draper’s Hall, headquarters of one of the old London livery companies. Herbert James Draper paintings combined academic figure drawing with an almost Post-Impressionist colour range and pointillist technique, designed to retain the painting's brilliancy when seen from a distance and under the artificial lighting of the company’s dinners. Despite these successes, Draper was never elected Royal Academician, or even Associate. By the time of his death, Herbert James Draper paintings had fallen out of favour and he did not even receive an obituary in the Times. There is no modern study of Herbert James Draper's art, but two of his paintings were included in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989.