Richard Westall

Richard Westall was born on 2 January 1765. Modern scholarship, including the Royal Academy's own artist record citing a revised Dictionary of National Biography entry, places his birth in Reepham, Norfolk, where the artist was baptized at All Saints, Norwich. Older reference works, including Grove and Benezit, instead give Hertford, Hertfordshire, as his birthplace, and that attribution still appears in some encyclopedic sources. His younger brother, William Westall (1781 to 1850), also became a noted landscape painter.

Westall was apprenticed to a heraldic engraver in London beginning in 1779. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1784 and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools the following year, from December 1785. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in November 1792 and a full Royal Academician in February 1794. Over his career he exhibited more than 300 works at the Royal Academy and around 70 at the British Institution, and in 1814 he staged a major one-man exhibition of over 300 pictures, connected to the patronage of the writer and collector Richard Payne Knight.

In his later years Westall served as drawing master to Princess Victoria, the future Queen Victoria, a role he held for about eight years until his death. Victoria later recalled him as a patient and agreeable teacher. He faced financial difficulties after a series of unwise investments and received support from the Royal Academy and from the Duchess of Kent, who also assisted his visually impaired sister, who lived with him. Westall never married. He died on 4 December 1836 at his home in Fitzroy Square, London, at the age of 71, less than a year before his former pupil was crowned queen.

Westall was a prominent, sometimes divisive figure in his own time. Lord Byron, whose portrait Westall painted, is recorded as having greatly admired his work. Contemporary critic Anthony Pasquin was harsher, describing one Westall exhibit as relying on showy technique over substance, in an 1796 guide to the Royal Academy exhibition. Richard Payne Knight, by contrast, is recorded as praising the heroic composition and rich colouring of The Grecian Marriage. The range of these reactions, from a poet's admiration to a critic's skepticism, reflects the debate around Westall's polished, theatrical style of history painting, which was widely exhibited and widely illustrated in books but not universally admired by contemporaries. His 2025 auction record suggests renewed collector interest in reassessing that record today.

Westall's market is thin by volume but has strengthened recently. His current auction high is The Grecian Marriage, which sold for GBP 163,800 (about USD 224,900) at Christie's London on 2 July 2025, more than doubling the prior record of USD 89,900 set by Faust and Lilith at Christie's London in December 2012. The painting had been exhibited in Westall's own 1814 one-man show and was praised at the time by Richard Payne Knight, a patron of the artist. Beyond this headline result, sale prices for Westall's paintings, drawings, and watercolors have historically ranged more modestly, reflecting his status as a well regarded but not top-tier Georgian history painter.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Richard Westall, so provenance, exhibition history, and comparison to securely signed, Royal Academy exhibited works are the main tools for authentication. His auction record is thin in volume, and the 2025 sale of The Grecian Marriage shows how a single well provenanced, well exhibited work can reset the ceiling for the artist. Basic biographical facts, including his exact birthplace and the precise start date of his apprenticeship, are recorded inconsistently across older and newer reference sources, so collectors should expect some variation between catalog entries and treat the most recent institutional scholarship, such as the Royal Academy's own artist record, as the most reliable.