Lefevre James Cranstone

Lefevre James Cranstone (March 6, 1822 – June 22, 1893) was an English artist known for his watercolor genre-style landscapes and oil paintings. He visited the United States, where many of his works are displayed, and later moved to Australia.

Cranstone was the second of thirteen children born in Hemel Hempstead, England to Joseph, Jr. and Maria Lefevre Cranstone. In 1838 he enrolled in Henry Sass's School of Art in London and at age 18 was received as a probationer at the coveted Royal Academy Schools on April 21, 1840. Following his formal training he exhibited a number of oil paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street and the Royal Academy. In addition to his water color and oil paintings, during his lifetime Cranstone also produced etchings and pen and ink and chalk drawings. He was also an art teacher in his wife Lillia's boarding school.

For a ten-month period in 1859-1860 Cranstone with his younger brother, Alfred, visited America to visit cousins in Virginia and Indiana. During the trip he prepared almost 300 pen and ink with wash sketches documenting both the rural and urban areas of antebellum America they visited.

On July 12, 1882 Cranstone's wife, Lillia, died. Shortly afterwards, Cranstone and two of his children, Beatrice Lillia and Frederic George, joined his third son, William, now a medical doctor, and his new wife, Ellen Kent, in moving to the small town of Clermont, Queensland, Australia. Here, Cranstone continued his painting of the local land and seascapes. In 1889 he moved with Beatrice to Brisbane where he continued drawing local subjects up to his death on June 22, 1893.

Today, Cranstone's paintings can be found in the art collections of the White House; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Virginia Historical Society; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; the Oglebay Institute Mansion Museum in Wheeling, W. Virginia; the Dacorum Heritage Trust, Berkhamsted, England and a number of other institutions and private collections. A collection of the art he prepared in Australia along with a volume of illustrated poetry verse brought with him from England can be found at the John Oxley Library in Brisbane.

The sketches he made during his American visit became available for sale in 1928 and are at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. In 1933 another collection of 98 larger watercolor versions of a representative number of these sketches were sold at auction. One particular painting from this time was the oil Slave Auction, Virginia which hangs in the Virginia Historical Society. Donald L. Smith's biography contains a facsimile of this painting along with a letter written by Cranstone to the Hemel Hempstead Gazette dated December 29, 1860 on the election of President Lincoln and the horrors of slavery.