Chambers Junior, George, 1829–1878

On the Thames at Greenwich — Image credit: Lytham St Annes Art Collection of Fylde Borough Council

George Chambers Junior (1829–1878)

Lytham St Annes Art Collection of Fylde Borough Council

Chambers was the eldest son of the Whitby-born seaman turned marine painter George Chambers senior (1803–1840) and his wife Mary Anne. He was born on 14th June 1829 at 11 Wapping Wall, London, and baptised George William Crawford at St Paul’s, Shadwell, on 8th July. ‘Crawford’ was in honour of the Wapping inn keeper, Christopher Crawford, who was his father’s early London patron and perhaps his godfather. He is generally known as George Chambers junior, however, which is how he usually signed his work in one form or another. This was mostly merchant shipping scenes, the best often being small, fluidly painted Thames views, though he also worked on the south and Yorkshire coasts, while Dutch subjects show he also visited Holland. Compared to his father, his larger canvases tend to show his deficiencies in colour and as a draughtsman, but his sketchy way of painting masting and rigging is a distinctive feature.

On his father’s death, after a long decline from tuberculosis, George junior (then 11) was admitted to the Greenwich Hospital School thanks to the influence of E. H. Locker, the Hospital’s senior commissioner, who was one of George senior’s later patrons in commissioning works for presentation to the Naval Gallery in the Hospital’s Painted Hall, the most notable being The Bombardment of Algiers, 1816 in 1836. Whether George junior went to sea in early adult life is unknown – since most Greenwich boys did – as is whether he was more than self-taught as a painter. In autumn 1852 he married in London to Susanna Warrell (1829–1889) and had four known children – two boys and two girls – baptised between 1853 and 1866. Whether all survived is unclear or whether the last two, Emily and Walter, were just baptised together or were twins.

Chambers lived at many changing London addresses as far east as Greenwich and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1850 to 1861, the British Institution from 1848 to 1862 and (in all years) at the Society of British Artists from 1850 to 1862. One or two undated South American landscapes, at least one signed, formerly underpinned a verbal report that he later worked there and died in a riot in Trinidad about 1900. This is outlined (as unsubstantiated) in both E. H. H. Archibald’s Dictionary of Sea Painters and in Alan Russett’s full study of his father, which briefly discusses him. These views of South America remain a puzzle, though George junior’s younger brother William Martin Chambers (1832–1890) and the latter’s son George (1859–1942) also painted.

There is – at least so far – no other evidence that he crossed the Atlantic and, despite not exhibiting after 1862, English subjects into the 1870s are recorded. In 2012 it was confirmed that he died on 12th January 1878, aged 49, still living with his family at 112 Livingstone Road, Clapham Junction. The cause, as with his father, was pulmonary tuberculosis.

Pieter van der Merwe

Text source: Art Detective