Thomas Woolner Painting by Paul Meijering

About "Thomas Woolner Painting"

by Paul Meijering

About the artwork

Realistic painting in acrylic of the English sculptor Thomas Woolner with his famous work; "Virgilia laments the absence of Coriolanus", painted by the artist Paul Meijering - the original painting is 90 x 90 cm and available for sale.

Thomas Woolner (Hadleigh, Suffolk, 17 December 1825 - London, 7 October 1892) was an English sculptor and poet. He was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and was the only sculptor in that company.

Woolner was trained by the sculptor William Behnes. From 1842 he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited there for the first time in 1843. There he made the acquaintance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Woolner initially had little success in gaining commissions. Little remains of his early work, but his depiction of 'Puck', a character from William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, attracted the attention of Hunt and others, leading to an invitation to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848.

He produced several pictures of famous people and thereby established his reputation, although he did not make a good living from the proceeds. As a poet, he contributed to The Germ, the movement's short-lived journal. One of the more famous poems he published in the magazine was 'My Beautiful Lady', a work that he would later expand considerably. However, he felt that he was more of a sculptor than a writer.