Frederick Swynnerton

Frederick Swynnerton
Born	1858
Died	1918
Residence	Oakwood Place, Simla, India [1900]
Occupation	artist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1902 last listed elected_AI 1899.05.30

Notes

House Notes

1899.05.09 proposed

Notes From Elsewhere

Frederick Swynnerton was a portrait painter born in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being older than the Jatakas, older than the Mahabharata, older than history itself’.
Frederick never knew a single career. He wrote about neolithic Manx history, he wrote on Indian themes for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, but painting was dominant. He was taught first in Rome, where he lived in the ménage kept by his older brother Joe and his wife, Annie Swynnerton, the painter, suffragette and the first woman to to be elected to the Royal Academy. He went on to the Académie Julian in Paris and then set out for India, hoping to make a career for himself as a portrait painter. (He never entirely got over his time in Rome. He revisited the city years later and acquired part of a mural from Nero’s Golden House, which depicts Leda waiting for her swan. He sold the fragment to the British Museum in 1908 – the portraitist of one empire collecting and selling the art of another.) He married the daughter of an Anglo-Italian fencing and soldiering family, and lived with them in Simla.
‘Portraiture is always independent of Art and has little or nothing to do with it,’ the painter Benjamin Haydon wrote in the 1820s. ‘It is one of the staple manufactures of the empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise, they carry and will ever carry on trial by jury, horse racing and portrait painting.’ Portraiture isn’t really independent of art, but as Caroline Corbeau-Parsons explains in the catalogue to the Artist and Empire exhibition at Tate Britain (until 10 April), portraiture in India wasn’t simply painting; it was part of a rite introduced by Warren Hastings to reduce corruption within the East India Company. Instead of accepting ornate gifts from Indian potentates, officials were to be given pictures of those they wished to influence or rule over.
So painters like Frederick had an imperial calling, just as religious men, like his brother Charles, had. Or at least an opportunity: the problem faced by portrait painters in India was that their sitters didn’t always pay since they got nothing in return. That presumably was the point: the unreciprocated act of giving was a blunt reminder of the power of those unto whom gifts are given, but the people most likely to lose out were the artists themselves. Frederick’s life in India wasn’t easy. ...
In 1917, he went to Bombay to see his daughter Margery, who had been a nurse in Iraq where she caught pneumonia – she would become my grandmother. His idea of a get-well present was a bottle of champagne. She, like her father, was a painter and shared his belief in the therapeutic powers of fizz. ‘Tea? Coffee?’ she asked when I went to have breakfast with her after an overnight flight from the US. ‘Champagne?’
Fred died suddenly in Bombay in 1918 and was buried at the Sewri cemetery. He had been on his way from one empire to the ruins of another: he was bound for Rome.

Brother of the sculptor Joseph Swynnerton. From the Isle of Man on the history of which he published various papers.