CORO | Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



James Hayllar (British painter) 1829 - 1920
La Cantoria, Florence, 1853
pencil and watercolour 
26.7 x 16.5 cm. (10.5 x 6.5 in.)
signed and inscribed 'Jas Hayllar March 1853 from Lucca de la [sic] Robbia Uffizi - Florence' (on the reverse)
private collection

James Hayllar began his career as a portrait painter and started to send his work to the Royal Academy in 1851, continuing to exhibit until 1898. He was born in Chichester in 1829, and his family were of Sussex yeoman stock, originally Quakers and proud to be related to Richard Cobden. When a young man Hayllar showed talent for drawing and modelling and took lessons from the local artist called Joy. With the usual reluctance of Victorian parents, Hayllar's father agreed to send him to Cary's Art School in London. Francis Stephen Cary was a respectable historical painter, who took over the Henry Sass's Academy in Bloomsbury in 1842. He is now remembered as a teacher, as his pupils included many young artists later to become famous, including John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On completing his studies Hayllar made a tour of the continent, where he encountered Frederic Leighton in Rome in 1851. Between 1857 and 1868 he seems to have tried his hand at literary and genre painting, and produced some very charming observations of Victorian life.

During this period Hayllar painted some of his most important works, including The Queens Highway in the Sixteenth Century of 1864, Queen Elizabeth's Toothache of 1865 and Miss Lilly's Carriage Stops the Way in 1866, which was highly praised when exhibited at the Royal Academy. After these successes William Powell Frith and Eyre Crowe proposed him as an associate to the Royal Academy, but he missed election by one vote and never tried again. In 1865 he submitted pictures to the Academy from Carlton Rockery, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, whilst a decade later he moved to Castle Priory, on the banks of the Thames, near Wallingford in Berkshire. He was to live here until after the death of his wife, and his move to Bournemouth in 1899.

Hayllar had four sons and five daughters, four of whom, Edith Hayllar (1860–1948), Jessica Hayllar (1858–1940), Mary Hayllar (1863-ca. 1950), and Kate Hayllar (fl. 1883–1900), became notable artists in their own right; all received their training from their father and exhibited at the Royal Academy.