# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Windus, William Lindsay

​WINDUS, WILLIAM LINDSAY (1822–1907), artist, born in Liverpool on 8 July 1822, was grandson of William Windus, curate-in-charge of Halsall near Ormskirk from 1765 to 1785, and son of John Windus by his wife Agnes Meek, a Scotswoman. He received his early education at Mr. MacMorran's private school in Liverpool. At the age of sixteen he first showed an artistic bent while watching William Daniels, the Liverpool portrait painter, paint a portrait of his stepfather. A chalk drawing which he then made of another member of the family arrested the attention of Daniels, who gave him some instruction. He next studied at the Liverpool Academy, and attended a life class kept by a brother of J. R. Herbert, R.A. This was all his art training. His earliest picture appears to have been ‘The Black Boy,’ painted in 1844. His first exhibited work, ‘Falstaff acting King Henry IV,’ was shown at the Liverpool Academy in 1845. In 1847 at the same place there appeared ‘Cranmer endeavouring to obtain a Confession from Queen Catherine’ (now the property of Mr. Andrew Bain of Hunter's Quay). In the same year he was elected an associate of the Liverpool Academy, and in 1848 a full member. At the suggestion of John Miller, an art patron, he visited London in 1850, and was deeply influenced by Millais's ‘Christ at the Home of His Parents’ in the Royal Academy. Accepting Pre-Raphaelite principles, he painted in 1852 ‘Darnley signing the Bond before the Murder of Rizzio.’ In 1856 he exhibited at the Royal Academy ‘Burd Helen.’ The work, though badly hung, attracted the attention of Dante Rossetti, who instantly took Ruskin to see it. Ruskin had overlooked it, but in a postscript to his academy notes of 1856 he wrote of ‘Burd Helen’ that its aim was higher, and its reserve strength greater, than any other work in the exhibition except the ‘Autumn Leaves’ by Millais. A photogravure of the picture, now belonging to Mr. Frederic Dawson Leyland, The Vyne, Basingstoke, is in Ruskin's works, library edit. xiv. p. 83. There followed in 1859 Windus's ‘Too Late,’ now the property of Mr. Andrew Bain, by which he is best known, and which he himself regarded as his masterpiece; but Ruskin condemned it ‘as the product of sickness, temper, and dimmed sight,’ a criticism which so pained Windus that he never sent to the Academy again. In 1861 he sent ‘The Outlaw’ to the Liverpool Academy.
Windus married in 1858 a sister of Robert Tonge, a fellow artist; she died on 2 Aug. 1862, after a long illness, leaving a fifteen months' daughter, and her death so shook Windus's health and nerves that he gave up the serious pursuit of painting. Possessed of a competence, he resided quietly at Walton-le-Dale near Preston, and although he often painted he generally destroyed in the evening what he had accomplished in the daytime. In 1880 he left Lancashire for London, and then destroyed most of his sketches and studies.
In London he first lived in a pleasant old house at Highgate and then at Denmark Hill, where he died on 9 Oct. 1907. Of self-portraits in oils, one at the age of twenty-two belongs to his daughter, Mrs. Teed; another belongs to the Rev. James Hamilton of Liverpool. Millais, whom he somewhat resembled, also painted a portrait. After his retirement in 1862, Windus, an artist of extreme enthusiasm and sensitiveness, was practically forgotten until the spring exhibition of the New English Art Club of 1896, when three water-colours by him entitled ‘The Flight of Henry VI from Towton,’ ‘The Second Duchess,’ and ‘A Patrician, Anno Domini 60,’ were lent by their owners. They excited great interest amongst artists and connoisseurs. His work, which is scarce in quantity, is greatly valued as that of the most poetical and imaginative figure painter whom Liverpool has produced. In the early part of his career amateurs both in London and Liverpool eagerly bought anything he produced. Forty-five of his pictures were exhibited at the Historical Exhibition of Liverpool Art, in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, May–July 1908.
F. W. G-n.