John Linnell

John Linnell (1792-1882) was a landscape and portrait painter. He was born in Bloomsbury, London, the son of James Linnell, woodcarver. He was friends with William Blake and his son-in-law, Samuel Palmer, was also a painter. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy and the British Institution between 1807 and 1811, mostly landscapes. His friendship with Cornelius Varley, brother of John Varley, his teacher at the Academy, led him into Nonconformity, and in 1812 he joined the Baptist church in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury. He was a founding member in 1813 of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours. In 1814 he did the drawings for Samuel Bagster’s edition of Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Linnell became a Baptist in 1812, leaving the Bedford chapel and going with Cornelius Varley, younger brother of John Varley, to the Baptist meeting in Keppel Street under John Martin (Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years [London: Kegan Paul, 1947], 26). He was baptized there on 21 January 1812. Linnell also met Thomas Palmer, another member at Keppel Street and the church treasurer. Thomas Palmer lived in a small house in Swallow Street, near Oxford Street (Grigson 27).  He was a coal-merchant and a bookseller, and Linnell soon became attached to his daughter, Mary Palmer, whom he married in 1817. He painted many of the members at Keppel Street, including Martin. Samuel Bagster employed him as well (Grigson 33).

He married Mary Ann Palmer in 1817 (no relation to Samuel Palmer). In 1818 he was introduced to William Blake by George Cumberland, Jr. He worked closely with him on several projects, providing needed funds to Blake in his later years, and arranged his funeral in 1827. At this time Linnell was moving in a circle of artists and writers that included Charles Aders and Crabb Robinson.  He met Samuel Palmer the artist in 1822, introduced him to Blake in 1824, but eventually they split over their religious beliefs, Palmer being drawn to High Anglicanism eventually and Linnell leaving the Baptists sometime in the 1820s and eventually joining the Plymouth Brethren in 1843 (Palmer nevertheless married Linnell’s oldest daughter, Hannah). He left them in 1848, and thereafter belonged to no one group in particular, but always dissenting from the established church.  Linnell began exhibiting again at the Royal Academy in 1821, and continued to do so regularly until 1881, mostly portraits until 1847, which paid the most money. Initially his portraits were of Baptist ministers, such as his pastor, John Martin. Later he moved into portraits of aristocratic figures. His portraits of William Mulready and Sir Robert Peel hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Despite his success and repeated showings at the Royal Academy, he was consistently refused associate membership, an act Linnell believed was always based on a prejudice against him.  From 1847 most of his exhibited paintings were landscapes.