Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. Cover has a little fading and marking but pages and plates are excellent. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Biography Edward Wilkins Waite was born at Leatherhead in Surrey on 14 April 1854 the son of a Congregationalist minister the Revd Edward Waite MA and his wife Cleopha Julia n?e Dukes; the second in a family of six sons and two daughters. He was born into an artistic tradition; his grandfather William Watkin Waite was a miniaturist and his father an amateur watercolour painter. Three of his brothers became artists and two musicians. Waite was an amateur musician himself; a violinist and a conductor. He conducted the Abinger Choir when it won the full chorus prize at the Leith Hill Musical Festival in 1905 and is recorded in later years as conducting an orchestra at Woolhampton. Waite was educated at Mansion House Grammar School Leatherhead. In 1874 he went to Canada; sailing from Liverpool to Quebec aboard the steamship Circassian in July. He worked as a lumberjack near Palermo in Ontario during his stay in Canada which appears to have lasted for about two years; a sketch book from this journey survives (see exhibits 55 and 56 on page 44). Waite seems to have taken up painting seriously on his return. In 1878 he exhibited two pictures at the Royal Academy in London; again two in 1880 and thereafter with only eight breaks in every year until 1919; a total of forty six works altogether. Although his home was at Blackheath where in 1875 his father had become headmaster of the School for the Sons of Missionaries Waite visited Cornwall in the early 1880s and spent some three years sketching and painting there. On his return he spent much of his time in Brockham near Dorking in Surrey. On 22 January 1891 Waite married Barbara Isabella daughter of Sir Peter Tait and the eighth in a family of nine children. They spent the summer of that year at Street’s Farm Peaslake before moving in October to The Cottage Abinger Hammer. In November 1892 their first child Barbara was born. They had two more children John born in 1894 and Margaret born in 1896. (LL)