Crouching Leopard on a Rock

Oil on canvas laid on board, signed

26 x 36.6 cms
10¼ x 143/8 ins

Born at Poulton-le-Sands, which is now called Morecambe, Lancashire, on 1st October 1857, and he remained a Lancastrian throughout his life based in Heysham. William Woodhouse was a distinguished animal painter and is recorded as having studied at the Lancaster School of Art and the Nottingham School of Art. There is evidence that his works were used as examples for art students from which to learn. However, Woodhouse was basically self-taught as an animal painter and he frequented the slaughterhouses in order to study anatomy.

Woodhouse first exhibited when he was 24 at the Lancaster Exhibition. At the age of 26, he exhibited at the Royal Society of Artists. He exhibited Doomed and Wolves and Wild Boar at the Royal Academy in 1889 and 1896 and also showed at Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.

Technically brilliant and interested in textures, Woodhouse had a soft realistic style well suited to the depiction of animals. He worked in oils, watercolours, and gouache, and did paint landscapes and portraits in addition to his preferred sporting subjects. Woodhouse’s horses and dogs have an especially tender quality and are painted with great sensitivity.

Four years after Woodhouse’s death, Sydney Paviere, Curator of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, organised a memorial exhibition of eighty-nine of the artist’s works. He was the father of the artist Ronald Basil Emsley Woodhouse.