Albert Joseph Moore (British painter) 1841 - 1893
Albert Joseph Moore was an English painter, known for his depictions of langorous female figures set against the luxury and decadence of the classical world. He was born in York in 1841, the youngest of the fourteen children of the artist William Moore of York who in the first half of the 19th century enjoyed a considerable reputation in the North of England as a painter of portraits and landscape. In his childhood Albert Moore showed an extraordinary love of art, and as he was encouraged in his tastes by his father and brothers, two of whom afterwards became famous as artists — John Collingham Moore and Henry Moore, and he was able to begin the active exercise of his profession at an unusually early age. Several of his pictures are now in public collections; among the chief are Blossoms, in the National Gallery of British Art; A Summer Night in the Liverpool Corporation Gallery; Dreamers in the Birmingham Corporation Gallery; and a water-color, The Open Book, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. In all his pictures, save two or three produced in his later boyhood, he avoided any approach to story-telling, and occupied himself exclusively with decorative arrangements of lines and color masses. The spirit of his art is essentially classic, and his work shows plainly that he was deeply influenced by study of antique sculpture; but he was not in any sense an archaeological painter, nor did he attempt reconstructions of the life of past centuries. Artistically he lived in a world of his own creation, a place peopled with robust types of humanity of Greek mould, and gay with bright-colored draperies and brilliant-hued flowers. As an executant he was careful and certain; he drew finely, and his color-sense was remarkable for its refinement and subtle appreciation. Few men have equalled him as a painter of draperies, and still fewer have approached his ability in the application of decorative principles to pictorial art.
