Harry Quilter

Surrey, 1851 - 1907, London

BiographyLC name authority rec. n.88654806

Biography:
Quilter, Harry (1851–1907), art critic, was born at Knight Hill Road, Lower Norwood, Surrey, on 24 January 1851 to William Quilter (1808–1888) and his wife, Elizabeth Harriot Cuthbert (d. 1874). William Quilter was first president of the Institute of Accountants and a collector of British watercolours, and his eldest son, Sir William Quilter, first baronet (1841–1911), was also a collector, as well as a politician. Harry was privately educated and entered Cambridge University in 1870. He graduated BA in 1874 and MA in 1877. Abandoning his original intention, which was to pursue a career in business, Quilter opted to travel abroad instead, informally studying art in Italy.

After returning to England, Quilter began preparing for the bar as a student of the Inner Temple, which he had entered in 1872. Meanwhile he continued to study art, enrolling at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1876 he began writing art criticism for The Spectator, and he continued until 1887. He was called to the bar in 1878, but an attack of smallpox and a restless temperament made it difficult for him to concentrate his energies. He subsequently abandoned his career in law and devoted his time to art and journalism. From 1879 to 1887 he lectured on art and literature around England. In 1880–01 he worked for a short time as art critic for The Times, taking over from Tom Taylor. Between 1884 and 1893 he exhibited at the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours and in 1885 he studied landscape painting at Van Hove's studio in Bruges. Despite his efforts he never succeeded as an artist, but rather became known for his art criticism. In 1886 he applied for the Slade professorship at Cambridge, but failed. Tired of being edited, he started his own periodical in 1888, entitled The Universal Review, which only lasted a year. On 16 June 1890 he married Mary Constance (b. 1869/70), daughter of a gentleman, Charles Hall; they had six children.

Quilter was a prolific writer and contributed to numerous newspapers and periodicals, including the Contemporary Review, the Cornhill Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, Fraser's Magazine, MacMillan's Magazine, the National Review, the New Review, and the Nineteenth Century. In addition to art he wrote about theatre, literature, and women's rights (as an opponent). He was renowned for his outspokenness, which often resulted in controversy. He was a conservative art critic whose views reflected those of the ‘philistine’. He opposed avant-garde movements, such as aestheticism and impressionism. Ideologically opposed, he was an enemy of James McNeill Whistler, siding in the press with John Ruskin during the famous Ruskin versus Whistler trial of 1878. In 1879 he infuriated Whistler by purchasing the artist's former home, the White House, in Chelsea, and replacing the painter's interior design with his own conservative style. Whistler sought vengeance on 'Arry (Whistler's nickname for Quilter) after he castigated the artist's Venetian etchings in The Times. Quilter's criticism, along with Whistler's rebuttal, appeared in the artist's book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, in 1890. He found himself at the centre of yet another dispute between the philistine and the avant-garde regarding Edgar Degas's L'absinthe (1875–6), which was displayed at the Grafton Gallery, London, in 1893. The controversy began when the art critic D. S. MacColl maintained in The Spectator that the painting set a standard for art. Quilter, writing for the Westminster Gazette, joined a band of philistine art critics who retaliated against MacColl's assertion.

Quilter also wrote several books, including Sententiae artis (1886), Preferences in Art, Life, and Literature (1892), and Opinions on Men, Women and Things (1909). The climax of his career as an artist was his one-man show held in January 1894 at the Dudley Gallery. Between 1894 and 1896 he managed two boarding-schools using a system he formulated and wrote about in the Nineteenth Century in 1895. He continued to write up until his death on 10 July 1907 at 42 Queen's Gate Gardens, London, and was buried at Norwood; his wife survived him. Most of his collections were sold at Christies in April 1906.

William Roberts, rev. Kimberly Morse Jones
(William Roberts, “Quilter, Harry (1851–1907),” rev. Kimberly Morse Jones, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004. Accessed August 2015. www.oxforddnb.com).

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