James Baker Pyne (1800–1870) was born in Bristol. Following the wishes of his family, he was articled to an attorney with a view to a career in law, but in his free time he taught himself to draw. By the age of twenty-one he had given up law to paint and by the late 1820s he was supplementing his income as a successful drawing master, numbering William James Müller (1812–1845) and George Arthur Fripp (1813– 1896) amongst his pupils. At this time Pyne was influenced by other Bristol painters, especially the dark and dramatic works of Francis Danby (1793– 1861).
In 1835 Pyne moved to London and established a studio in Dorset Square. From this time onwards he exhibited almost entirely at Suffolk Street; in 1842 he was elected a member of the Society of British Artists and later Vice-President. He also occasionally showed his paintings at the Royal Academy and the British Institute.
From the 1830s Pyne's work increasingly showed the influence of J.M.W. Turner, employing dramatic effects and increasingly restricted palette, often dominated by pale yellow. His landscape subjects expanded outside of Bristol to include the wider West Country, the Lake District and North Wales. In 1838 he made the first of many trips to Europe, gathering material for subjects in the Alps, the Rhine, the Tyrol and the Italian Lakes. In 1848 the art dealer, William Agnew commissioned Pyne to paint in the Lake District, followed by a three-year tour of Italy in 1851, in which he was accompanied by the Bristol watercolourist William Evans (1809–1858). His Lake District tour resulted in two volumes of lithographs, The English Lake District (1853) and Lake Scenery of England (1859).
James Baker Pyne is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, Tate and V&A, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, National Museum Cardiff, National Galleries of Scotland and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
