Richard Westall RA (1765–1836) was born at Reepham, Norfolk, the family residence being Kerdistone Manor. After his mother's death in 1770, his father was declared bankrupt, but soon remarried and moved to Hertford, where Richard's younger brother, the artist William Westall (1781–1850), was born. Following this period of difficulty, the young Richard moved to London, where in 1779 he became apprenticed to John Thompson, a heraldic engraver on silver; he also studied at an evening school run by Thomas Simpson. The Norfolk artist John Alefounder instructed Westall in the execution of miniatures and advised him to become a painter.
In 1784 he exhibited the first of 384 pictures at the Royal Academy. He was admitted as a student of the Academy Schools in the following year, became an associate of the academy in 1792, and was made a full academician in 1794. Around this time he began what was to be a life-long friendship with the artist Thomas Lawrence, the pair living together for several years.
Westall's paintings in watercolour garnered significant praise: Horace Walpole described the figure of Sappho in Sappho Chanting the Hymn of Love (exh. RA, 1796) as ‘beautiful beyond description’ and his Hesiod Instructing the Greeks (exh. RA, 1796) as ‘by far one of the finest compositions ever painted in England’. Joseph Farington recorded in his diary that ‘the King particularly dwelt on Westall's drawings and said he had never seen anything equal to them’. One of Westall’s champions was Richard Payne Knight, who became his patron and allegedly thought that Westall was as good as Raphael or Rubens. He praised Westall for showing characters 'from common familiar life'.
In the 1790s Westall contributed to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and to Fuseli's Milton Gallery, beginning a prolific period providing literary illustrations which included Sir Walter Scott's novels, the works of Byron, William Cowper, James Thomson and Robert Burns. Byron even declared that Westall's illustrations for Don Juan were 'superb—the brush has beat the poetry’.
From around 1815 onwards Westall's reputation slowly declined. Almost bankrupt, for the last nine years of his life he worked as drawing master to Princess Victoria. Westall produced two albums of drawings for the purpose of copying by the young princess; these, along with Princess Victoria's watercolours and Westall's portrait of her can be seen in the Royal Collection.
