Mr. Howard, the well-known Secretary and Professor of Painting to the
Royal Academy, died October 5, 1847, in the seventy-eighth year of his
age. He was born in 1770; and was at Rome in 1794, when, in his
twenty-fourth year, he forwarded his first work, “The Death of Cain,” to
the Royal Academy Exhibition. In 1807, he painted “The Infant Bacchus
brought by Mercury to the Nymphs of Nysa;” and in the autumn of the same
year, he was elected a Royal Academician. Of his fellow academicians, in
1848, only two out of forty survived--Sir Martin Archer Shee, and Mr. J.
M. W. Turner. Others, however, elected after him, had died before
him--Callcott, and William Daniell, for instance; Wilkie, Dawe, Raeburn,
Hilton, Collins, Jackson, Chantrey, Constable, and Newton. His diploma
picture on his election was “The Four Angels, loosed from the River
Euphrates.” For fifty-three years, from 1794 to 1847, Mr. Howard never
missed sending to a Royal Academy Exhibition. It would be difficult,
perhaps, to find another example of such assiduity; yet, where his
pictures went--for he had few or no patrons, so called--it is hard to
say. Banks and Flaxman, the two great sculptors, took notice of Howard’s
early efforts, gave him friendly encouragement in all he did, and
suggested, it is said, new subjects for his pencil. Yet, his pictures
were very popular; they are classically cold; his place, therefore, in
the history of Art is not likely to be high or lasting.