Louis King Bradford, Landscape and Subject Painter
(b. 1807, d. 1862)
Landscape and Subject Painter
From A Dictionary of Irish Artists 1913
Was born in 1807, the son of George Bradford (d. 1817), cutler, of No. 8 Grafton Street (whose father was a razor-maker in Clonmel), by his wife Katherine, daughter of Louis King, cutler (d. 1836). He studied in the Dublin Society's School, which he entered in 1824, and in 1827, while still a student, he began to exhibit in the Royal Hibernian Academy. Down to 1838 he confined himself to landscape, but in 1840 he contributed two subjects from Don Quixote, and thenceforth exhibited subject pieces as well as landscapes in oil and in water-colour. Among his exhibited works were "Imogen at the Cave," in 1841; "The Separation," and "The Rescue" in 1843, and "Peasant Girls of the Provinces of Ulster, Connaught, Munster and Leinster," in 1852, of which a contemporary criticism says that it "would have been much better as four separate pictures; at present it has much the appearance of an overgrown sheet of prints" ("Irish Quarterly Review"). He exhibited a water-colour, "The Moated Grange," at the Society of British Artists in 1854. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1855. Bradford resided from 1828 to 1842 with his mother who kept a ladies' school at No. 1 Fairview Avenue, and afterwards at 4 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, where he died on 28th October, 1862. His wife, Martha Isabella, predeceased him, dying in 1856.