page_title: Henry Ninham
section_title: John Ninham
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Ninham / Family / John Ninham
caption_attribution_description: This undated portrait is of John Ninham (1754-1817), one of the founding members of the Norwich School of painters.
context_page_description: Henry Ninham was an English landscape artist, engraver and heraldic painter. He and his father John Ninham belonged to the Norwich School of painters, a group of artists who all worked or lived in Norwich during all or part of their working lives from around 1800 to 1880. Along with the Norwich School artists John Thirtle and David Hodgson, he was the foremost recorder of Norwich's architectural heritage prior to the invention of photography.
  The son of John Ninham, who was one of the Norwich School's founding members, Ninham trained as a panel painter under his father and was taught art by John Crome. Throughout much of his adult life, he was directly involved in running the family printing business in Chapelfield Lane, Norwich. After a largely uneventful life, he died in Norwich in 1874.
  Ninham rarely travelled far from home to find new subjects. A skilled engraver, his works have provided historians with invaluable information regarding the appearance of many of Norwich's streets and medieval, Tudor and Georgian buildings prior to their demolition.
context_section_description: Henry Ninham's father John was born in Norwich in about 1754. He probably never received any formal education and was indentured to an unknown master as a heraldic painter and an engraver. He lived and worked at 11, Chapel Field, where he specialised in painting coach panels, in common with his contemporary John Crome. He married Elizabeth Wine on 12 June 1774.
  John Ninham is the least well known of Crome's contemporaries and few works have been attributed to him. His Beach Scene, painted in the 1760s, is considered by the historian Andrew Moore to have been important in establishing his artistic style. Ninham's series of eleven India ink drawings of the city gates of Norwich were produced in 1792-3, and were included in Robert Fitch's Views of the Gates of Norwich made in the years 1792-3 by the Late John Ninham (1861). The drawings, produced using a camera obscura, are of interest to historians as they were made just before the gates were demolished by the city authorities. John Ninham is considered to belong to the Norwich School of painters, but unlike many of the artists of the Norwich School, he was neither a member of the Norfolk and Norwich Society of Artists, nor did he exhibit there. His works were shown at the Norfolk and Suffolk Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in 1831, and at the Norfolk and Norwich Fine Arts Exhibition in 1860.
  John Ninham died in Norwich on 16 August 1817, his obituary being published in the Norfolk Chronicle the following week. His heraldic and printing business was taken over by his sons Henry and Thomas.
caption: Portrait of John Ninham (Norfolk Museums Collections)
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