Identity:

Edward Henry Rickman Holmes was a landscape, marine and portrait painter. He was the brother of the genre painter George Augustus Holmes. He lived at 62 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, near JW, from 1870 and later at 147 Church Street, Chelsea.

Life:

Holmes was active as an artist from 1841 until 1891, exhibiting during this period at the Royal Academy, British Institution, Grosvenor Gallery and Royal Society of British Artists in London. He also exhibited with the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Manchester City Art Gallery. In 1889 he was elected into membership of the Royal Society of British Artists, a society of which JW had been President from 1886 until 1888. Holmes lived close to JW at 62 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a fashionably artistic area of London. In 1886 when JW called a meeting of the SBA in order to challenge the council's ruling that he could not put 'Pupil of Whistler' after his pupil's names in the SBA catalogue, he wrote that 'my neighbor Mr. Holmes' would attend such a meeting.

Bibliography:

Wood, Christopher, Dictionary of Victorian Painters, Woodbridge, 1971; Johnson, J., and Anna Gruetzner, Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940, Woodbridge, 1980; http://www.getty.edu/research (accessed 2003).