Robert Courtenay Hulme, one of the reportedly eighteen children of Staffordshire-born artist and pottery designer Jesse Hulme (1789–1852) and his Cornish wife Elizabeth Trewolla (1791–1862), was born on 5th April 1834 in Hanley, in the Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. By the 1851 census, Hulme was aged 17 and was living with his father and mother, as an ‘artist pupil’, at 23 Albion Street. Slater’s Directory of the same year listed him as a ‘designer’. In the 1861 census, Hulme was listed, now aged 25, as an unmarried lodger at 3 Gloucester Grove West (later renamed Clareville Grove), Old Brompton, Kensington, his occupation recorded as ‘art student at the South Kensington Museum’. It was from this Gloucester Grove West address in 1862 that he submitted his only recorded work to the Royal Academy, as catalogue number 502, ‘A Gipsy Encampment – Barnes Common’.
The Post Office Directory of 1875 listed Hulme as an ‘artist’ living at 8, Douro Place, West Kensington. According to the 1881 census, Hulme, aged 45 [sic], was living at 12, Talgarth Road, Chelsea, and was described as an ‘artist and landscape painter’. Also living at the address were his wife, their son Courtenay Trewolla Hulme, his daughter Margaret Fanny Hulme, and two servants.
Hulme died at the same Talgarth Road address two months later, on 4th June 1881, and was buried, aged 47 [sic], on 8th June, in a private grave in Old Brompton Cemetery, London. On 19th June 1881, from the Talgarth Road address, both his son Courtenay and his daughter Margaret were baptised at St Andrew’s Church, Hove, in Sussex.
Text source: Art Detective, contributed by Kieran Owens
