Detail from The Canal, Amsterdam, 1889, James McNeill Whistler, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

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William Henry Jobbins

Date of birth: 1851
Place of birth: Birmingham
Date of death: [1893]
Category: painter

Identity:

William H. Jobbins was a painter of landscape and views of Venice.

He may have been one of several children of Sarah and Thomas Jobbins or Jolbings, a house painter (1851 Staffordshire census, which says he was born in Handsworth, Staffordshire). By 1861 the family was recorded in Birmingham and the name was given as Jobbins.

In the UK census for Leicester in 1871 he was recorded as aged 20, born in Birmingham, a teacher at the School of Art. He became assistant principal of Nottingham School of Art, 1875-1878. About 1880 he was in Venice and about 1889 in India.

Life:

Jobbins exhibited work at the Royal Academy from 1878-1886, and at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and Fine Art Society in London. He also exhibited at Manchester City Art Gallery.

According to Henry Woods, quoted by Luke Fildes, Whistler shared a studio with Jobbins in Venice for several months, although Jobbins objected to Whistler's liaison with Maud Franklin. Jobbins provided Whistler with some fine old brown, blue and pink paper that he found in an old warehouse near the Merceria.

Whistler said that he altered - and spoilt - the etching Traghetto [231] because Jobbins, 'a - duffer - a painter - thought it was incomplete'.

Pennell records that Whistler gave Jobbins a panel, perhaps Nocturne of the Giudecca, Venice y219, and that Jobbins thought so little of it that he painted a sketch on the back and then sold it to the American painter C. S. Forbes.

Bibliography:

1871 UK census, Ancestry.com; Kingswell family tree, Ancestry. com. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols, London and Philadelphia, 1908; Johnson, J., and Anna Gruetzner, Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940, Woodbridge, 1980; Fildes, L. V. (ed.), Luke Fildes R. A.: A Victorian Painter, London, 1968 ; Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980; Grieve, Alastair, Whistler's Venice, New Haven and London, 2000 . MacDonald, Margaret F., Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice, Aldershot and California, 2001. ArtUK website. 'William H Jobbins', British Museum website.