Alfred Fowler Patten

Alfred Fowler Patten was born in 1829. A single source, the stock-image archive Alamy, gives London as his birthplace, drawing on standard authority files; this detail has not been independently corroborated and should be treated as provisional. He was the son and pupil of the portrait painter George Patten (1801 to 1865), and there is no record of him receiving formal art school training. His practice specialized in historical genre, literary and theatrical subjects, Orientalist scenes, and country landscapes.

Patten exhibited at the Royal Academy in London from 1850 to 1878, and also showed work at the British Institution, the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham, and the Manchester City Art Gallery. In 1874 he was elected a member of the Society of British Artists, later known as the Royal Society of British Artists, and continued to exhibit there for two decades. A signed and dated oil, A Little Stage Fairy, was shown at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887 or 1888 as catalogue number 418, priced at 36 pounds at the time. Other recorded titles include Hamlet and Ophelia, The Fair Persian Tempting the Sheikh with Wine, and The Child and the Star, dated 1882. He signed his work A.F. Patten.

Sources disagree on when he died. Market reference works, including MutualArt, Christie's, and Alamy, give 1888 as his year of death. The University of Glasgow's Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler project, a more detailed scholarly source, records him as active into the 1890s and gives his dates only as 1829 to after 1888, noting that he continued exhibiting at the Society of British Artists until 1895. That later exhibiting record sits uneasily with a firm 1888 death date. No source gives an exact death date or place. Patten was, in any case, deceased well before the twentieth century; he is not living today.

No verbatim, attributable critical commentary from a named critic in a major outlet has been located for Patten. His standing in his own time is best evidenced institutionally: three decades of Royal Academy exhibiting, election to the Society of British Artists in 1874, and showings at the British Institution, the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham, and the Manchester City Art Gallery. That is a solid, working mid-tier Victorian exhibiting record rather than evidence of major critical acclaim, and it should be read that way.

Patten's market is small and lightly documented. MutualArt records roughly 36 works by him that have appeared at auction, a figure that indicates a real but modest secondary market rather than a widely traded name. No source available for this profile confirms a specific all-time auction price, work, house, and date with enough detail to state a verified record; a Christie's lot page for A Little Stage Fairy shows exhibition history but no visible hammer price in the material reviewed. Collectors should not treat any single figure circulating for this artist as a confirmed benchmark without checking the originating sale record directly.

There is no catalogue raisonne, no estate, and no gallery currently representing Patten's work, so authentication depends on signature (A.F. Patten), exhibition provenance, and the cataloguing judgment of the auction house handling a given lot. His life dates themselves carry some uncertainty, with market databases and a university archival project disagreeing on when he died. Given the small number of recorded auction appearances and the absence of a confirmed top-line price, buyers should treat any market comparison for this artist as approximate and verify recent comparable sales directly with an auction house specialist before relying on aggregator figures.