Charles Robert Leslie

Painter, born in London, UK. He studied from 1800 in Philadelphia, and returned to England in 1811 to study at the Royal Academy. He was professor of drawing at West Point, NY (1833), and professor of painting at the Royal Academy (1848–52). His paintings were mostly scenes from famous plays and novels.

Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859), English genre painter, was born in London on 19 October 1794.

He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed high art, and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor;

Of individual paintings we may specify Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church (1819); He possessed a sympathetic imagination, which enabled him to enter freely into the spirit of the author whom he illustrated, a delicate perception for female beauty, an unfailing eye for character and its outward manifestation in face and figure, and a genial and sunny sense of humour, guided by an instinctive refinement which prevented it from overstepping the bounds of good taste.

In 1821 Leslie was elected A.R.A., and five years later full academician.

In 1833 he left for America to become teacher of drawing in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome one, and in some six months he returned to England.

In addition to his skill as an artist, Leslie was a ready and pleasant writer. His Life of his friend Constable, the landscape painter, appeared in 1843, and his Handbook for Young Painters, a volume embodying the substance of his lectures as professor of painting to the Royal Academy, in 1855. In 1860 Tom Taylor edited his Autobiography and Letters, which contain interesting reminiscences of his distinguished friends and contemporaries.