Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Philip Gilbert Hamerton was born on September 10, 1834, and died on November 4, 1894. Philip Gilbert Hamerton was an English artist, art reviewer, and author. He wrote a lot about the visual arts because he was a big supporter of modern printmaking. He came up with some important ideas about the English Etching Revival. Hamerton was born in Lancashire, England, in the town of Laneside, which is close to Shaw and Crompton. His mother died while giving birth to him, and ten years later, his father died. He moved in with his two aunts at an estate called the Hollins on the edge of Burnley when he was about five years old. He went to Burnley Grammar School there. Hamerton's first attempt at writing, a collection of poems, failed, so he focused on painting landscapes for a while. He camped out in the Scottish Highlands and eventually rented the former island of Inistrynich in Loch Awe, where he settled with his wife Eugénie Gindriez, who was the daughter of a French republican judge, in 1858. After a while, he realized that writing about art was more his forte than painting, so he went to Sens and then to Autun, where he wrote Painter's Camp in the Highlands (1863), a huge hit that paved the way for his famous book Etching and Etchers (1866).