William Matthison, 1853-1926

Born near Birmingham, England in 1853, William Matthison was a successful watercolor and oil painter educated at the Birmingham Central School of Art, and under the tutelage of Edward Watson, a successful landscape painter who regularly exhibited his watercolors and oil painting in London.

In 1875 Matthison is first recorded in a city directory as a professional artist in Birmingham. By 1877 he had settled in nearby Tysoe, Warwickshire, where he married Mary Hannah Fessey in 1878. By 1893 he is recorded as living in Oxfordshire, a region he made nationally popular through a series of drawings that were printed commercially as postcards commissioned by Raphael Tuck and Sons of Cambridge. Later a number of his original watercolors of the region were included in an important book on English watercolors titled Fifty Watercolor Drawings of Oxford compiled and published by Alden and Co. in 1912.

In 1883 Matthison was in nearby Danbury where he established a school where he instructed a number of students in painting. During his painting holidays he discovered the village of Whitby, which figured largely in his later landscape paintings. From 1891 to 1901 he lived and worked in nearby Neithrop where he established both a studio and a sales room where he sold his own work. By 1902, Matthison was in Oxford where he established himself as an artist and printmaker’s artist for a thriving postcard industry involved in selling printed versions of his views of the Lake District and London as well as his views of Windsor and the Thames River steamships, to thousands of Englishmen.

In 1911, Matthison exhibited 95 oil on canvas paintings in Oxford to rave printed reviews, one noting his canvases as “full of sunshine and colour.” By 1915 the artist and his family were living in Headington, where he painted by commission having attracted a following of wealthy merchants and members of the local aristocracy until his death on January 25, 1926. He is buried in Headington Cemetery. His wife, Mary Hannah Matthison lived to the age of ninety-one years and was buried next to her husband in 1939.

Recently, a rare signed landscape, one of only three landscapes by the artist currently known and recorded) demonstrating Matthison’s skill and talent as a landscape painter was sold in Tennessee, USA and is now in a private American collection The carefully rendered woodland view, entitled Near Whitby captures both a standing single figure and a seated pair looking over a wooded atmospheric vista where grazing sheep dot the distant hillsides seen against a blue horizon.

Accurate and up-to-date information on William Matthison can be found on-line at www.headington.org.uk/history/famous_people/matthison.htm

Submitted by Gary R. Libby, art historian and author, 2020