David Charles Read

David Charles Read (1790-1851) lived most of his adult life in Salisbury. He was apprenticed to the engraver John Scott (1774-1828) and for a time was a protégé of John Constable. In Salisbury, Read was considered the city’s finest drawing master, which may have been how came he came into the acquaintance of Maria Grace Saffery, an accomplished poet, schoolmaster, and wife of John Saffery, Baptist minister at Brown Street in Salisbury. It is possible Saffery sent some of her students to him for art instruction. Read etched a portrait of Goethe, but generally his work focused on impressive etchings of the landscape around Salisbury and the New Forest, many of which were the result of his own distinctive form of printmaking he practised between 1828 and 1845.  Two volumes of his proofs reside in the British Museum.