Eighteen months ago I was contacted by a gallery in Cheltenham about their researching an artist for they had acquired four watercolours of London street scenes painted during a ten-year period from 1885.  They were by Edward Angell Roberts who had lived with Mary Ann Shortland, an ancestral cousin of mine.  Although they described themselves as husband and wife in official documents, Edward was already married to the exotically named Josephine Bartolozzi Vestry Anderson.

Edward was born in Kennington in the English county of Surrey in1836.  His father was a tea merchant and aspiring gentleman which presumably he became for by the age of fifteen, Edward was being educated at Christ Church Hospital, a school for sons of clergy and gentlemen.  It was a good springboard for Edward for in 1855 he was promoted to Deputy-assistant to the Commissary of the Inland Revenue before proceeding to becoming Clerk to the War Office.  In his spare time, he painted.

The four watercolours show great artistic detail of places within a stone’s throw of the War Office, in London’s Pall Mall.  They are New Street, Spring Gardens (1885), Old Wooden Houses, The Strand (1887), Garden House, Clements Inn (1895) and Pump Court, Temple (1895). They have since been sold at auction to a buyer in the United States.

Edward had married Josephine in 1858 and the census, three years later shows them living apart.  Whether that was a temporary separation is not known for shortly after they had two children, a girl in 1864 who died in infancy and a boy in 1866. However, by 1871 he was living with Mary Ann and Josephine and the son disappear from record.  It is thought that they may have moved to Ireland for the son reappears in the English 1901 census return and claimed to have spent time there.  As for Edward and Mary Ann, they never married (or had children) for in his will, Edward leaves his estate to Mary Ann Shortland, spinster.

I began to wonder if we had other artists in the family for several of my cousins, my sister and my father were all artistic,  I always felt that the skill had passed me by until some kind person exclaimed that through my career as a garden designer,  I paint with flowers, a description I rather hold onto.  It is true that there are some similarities for a new garden is a blank canvas waiting to be given a backwash of green and then daubed with the colour shapes and textures of flowers.  Below is a rather poor quality photo of one of my early designs inspired by a Japanese Imari plate which was, I suppose, quite any arty approach to take!!

Another ancestral cousin painted and illustrated books on the town of Rye.  Marian Eleanor Granville Bradley was the granddaughter of the Dean of Westminster Abbey, George Granville Bradley.  Mostly remembered for her line drawings, occasionally they or paintings of hers are available for sale at auction.  An only child, born in the United States, she returned to England sometime during the 1880s.  She never married and died in 1951.  Her pencil sketches of Rye appear very simple at first sight and, like Edward Angell Roberts, belie the attention to detail that is executed.  Interestingly, a couple of her close relatives are described as ‘oil and colour merchants’ so it seems that art provided a living for my family in more ways than one…

And finally, there is Uncle Les – not my uncle at all but (yet another) cousin of my father and, in the convention of the time, known to me as Uncle.  I only met Les the once for he died quite suddenly when I was young.  However, I did get to know his widow well, so it came as rather a surprise when I was sent this little pen and ink drawing of (I think) a house in Kingston-upon-Thames many years after her death. 

A few lines on Josephine.  With a name like hers, curiosity got the better of me and so enquiries were made and she turned out, as hoped, to be ‘interesting’.  She was a close relative of Madame Vestris, a famous, if not infamous actress, contralto opera singer and theatre manager.  Madame Vestris probably deserves a full article of her own!

Family history research is always uncovering something fascinating, puzzling or new – I wonder what it will turn up next?

With thanks to Andy Shield of Brave Fine Art , Cheltenham www.bravefineart.com }for sending me copies of the four paintings