page_title: George Vincent (painter)
section_title: Greenwich Hospital from the River (1827)
hierarchical_section_title: George Vincent (painter) / Selected paintings / Greenwich Hospital from the River (1827)
context_page_description: George Vincent was an English landscape artist. He is considered to be one of the most talented of the Norwich School of painters, who worked or lived in Norwich during all or part of their working lives from around 1800 to 1880. Vincent's work was founded on the style of John Crome, also of the Norwich School, and the Dutch School of landscape painting.
  The son of a weaver, he was educated at Norwich Grammar School and afterwards apprenticed to Crome. From 1811 until 1831 he exhibited annually at the Norwich Society of Artists, showing more than 100 pictures, mostly of Norfolk landscapes and marine works. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and elsewhere. By 1818 he had relocated to London, marrying the supposedly wealthy daughter of a surgeon in 1821. He was successful in obtaining the patronage of wealthy clients, but then began to struggle financially. The purchase of a grand house in London, combined with a tendency to drink, exacerbated his financial problems, and in 1824 he was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt.
context_section_description: George Vincent's talents as a landscape painter went largely unrecognised outside Norwich until 1862, when his 1827 work Greenwich Hospital from the River was shown at the International Exhibition. This large picture helped to secure his reputation as a great landscape painter. The Redgraves, writing in 1890 in the Landmarks in Art History series, described Vincent's "noble" and "thoroughly executed" painting as indicative of what he was capable of producing when at the height of his powers. According to William Dickes, Greenwich Hospital from the River was Vincent's masterpiece, comparable with the works of Dutch landscape painters Aelbert Cuyp and Jan van de Cappelle.
  Dickes described Greenwich Hospital from the River in The Norwich School of painters: "The sun is behind a golden-fringed cloud above the centre of the picture, its light suffusing the sky and powerfully reflected on the river between two groups of ships, where a timber raft is floating. In the front, dark against this light, three sailors in a boat are tying a rope to a buoy. There are other boats moving about, and in the distance between and beyond the timber ships, riverside craft and the towers of Greenwich Hospital." The painting was originally commissioned for a hundred guineas by a Mr Carpenter, as a result of the action of Vincent's friend James Wadmore. Wadmore, who had purchased View on the Wensum from George Vincent in 1819, stipulated that Carpenter should commission the picture in return for some of Wadmore's important manuscripts, required by Carpenter for his own use. The commission would have provided a much-needed source of income for Vincent.
  The painting was possibly the one lent by Wadmore to the Society of British Artists and exhibited in 1834. It was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition, sold in 1866 (after Wadmore's death) to a Mr Fordham of Stourton Castle, and then passed to William Orme Foster (1814–1899); Foster lent it to another exhibition in 1877. A Spectator article of that year described the work as "a fine, vigorous painting, the drawing and grouping of the boats being first-rate, and the sky also exceptionally good".
  Vincent painted Greenwich Hospital from the River Thames twice: a second, smaller painting, also known as Greenwich Hospital, was also painted in 1827. Dickes was the author of The Norwich School of Painting, a book that Peter Kennedy-Scott has described as "the Bible of the Norwich School".
caption: Greenwich Hospital (1827), a smaller work painted in the same year and with the same title as Vincent's more important work.
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