Author: Warren, Henry
Biography:
WARREN, Henry (1794-1879: findmypast.com)
Although Warren himself gave 1793 as his year of birth in a US census record, no public document has been located to confirm that date. His age at death in Dec. 1879 was reported as 85 and some biographies confidently give the date of birth as 24 Sept. 1794. His origins are obscure and his parentage so far unknown, but he was born in London and trained as an artist. Versatile and flexible, he made his name as a designer, watercolourist, and genre painter. In his youth he emigrated to the US and settled in Philadelphia PA. That may have been as early as 1815, which is the date of the first US newspaper reference to his work—the design of a proposed monument to George Washington. He married Eliza Hamilton (b 1793) in Philadelphia on 5 Jan. 1819; they had at least four children and two grandchildren born there between 1822 and 1850, the date of the US census in which they were registered. About 1860 Warren returned to England but he somehow eluded the 1861 and 1871 census, and the circumstances of his return are unclear. His wife and children may or may not have accompanied him. He might have spent some of the period of his absence travelling: many of his drawings and watercolours are of Arabian and African subjects, and he also published sketches from Norway and Sweden (1847). The two short works that he published with Ackermann are unexpectedly funny: they purport to explain key terms of music and art respectively, and are illustrated with copperplate engravings, but the “definitions” are often tongue-in-cheek and larded with puns (“the beau eye-deal” for instance). The later Treatise on Water-Colour Painting (1848, with Thomas Miller) and Artistic Anatomy of the Human Figure (1853) are more conventional. Warren died at his home in Wimbledon, Surrey, on 18 Dec. 1879 and was buried at the Brompton cemetery, Westminster, London, on 23 Dec. The Morning Post obituary noted that he had been knighted by Leopold, King of the Belgians, “in recognition of his talents as an artist,” and that he was the honorary president of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. (findmypast.com 21 Apr. 2024; ancestry.com 21 Apr. 2024; Allibone 3: 264; Philadelphia Gazette 8 Jul. 1815; Morning Post 24 Dec. 1879) HJ