Joshua Cristall was born in 1767 at CambourneinCornwall. His father was Scotch, and was bitterly opposed to his son's artistic tastes, but his mother secretly aided him in his struggles to study art. He was first apprenticed to a china dealer at Rotherhithe, but, finding that business too irksome, he left both his master and his home, and went to the Potteries, where he found some employment as a china painter. Finding this too monotonous, he came to London, and commenced a life of great privations and hard efforts to study the fine arts. It is said that at this period of his life he seriously injured his health by trying to live for a year on nothing else but potatoes and water. Aided in secret by his mother, who shared in and had herself directed his taste for classic art, he persevered in his endeavours, and finally gained admission to the school of the Royal Academy, where he made rapid progress. He became personally known to Dr. Monro, and visited at his house, where he met the rising water-colour artists of that day.
At the foundation of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1805, he first publicly exhibited his works, and continued to do so for many years. He was one of the foundation members of this society, and afterwards became its President, and was always its warm and active supporter. In 1822, finding his health much impaired, Cristall went to Goodrich on the Wye, where he had already bought a house, and where he spent many happy years until the loss of his wife, who died in 1840, drove him again to London, where he died in 1847. His body was carried to Goodrich, and buried by the side of his wife, at his own earnest request.
Cristall's usual subjects in his early years were classical figures with landscapes, such as his 'Lycidas,' 'Judgment of Paris,' 'Hylas and the Nymphs,' and 'Diana and Endymion,' but he afterwards produced genre subjects and rustic groups. About 1813 he tried portrait painting, generally small full-lengths with landscape backgrounds, in which he used no body-colour. As a water-colour painter Cristall will always hold an honourable position from the freedom and simplicity of his style and manner of execution. Five of his drawings, viz. 'The Young Fisher-Boy,' 'The Fish Market on Hastings Beach,' and three others, are in the South Kensington Museum. Cristall was one of the early members of the Sketching Society: he also furnished some of the classical figures in Barret's landscapes, as well as some of the groups in Robson's 'Scotch Scenery.'
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Bryan, Michael (1886). "CRISTALL, Joshua". In Graves, Robert Edmund (ed.). Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers (A–K). Vol. I (3rd ed.). London: George Bell & Sons.[[Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, volume 1|]]
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