John Seymour Lucas. John Seymour Lucas was a Victorian English historical and portrait painter, as well as an accomplished theatrical costume designer.
He was born into an artistic London family, and originally trained as a woodcarver, but turned his attention to portrait painting and entered first the St. Martin's Lane Art School and later the Royal Academy Schools. Here he met fellow artist Marie Cornelissen from France, whom he married in 1877.
Lucas' artistic education included extensive travels around Europe, particularly Holland and Spain, where he studied the Flemish and Spanish masters. He first started exhibiting in 1872, was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1876, and a full Royal Academician in 1898.
John Seymour Lucas was first and foremost a historical genre painter with a particular talent for realism in the depiction of costumes and interiors. Inspired by van Dyck and particularly Diego Velázquez, he excelled in depicting scenes from the British 16th-to 18th-century Tudor and Stuart periods, including in particular the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War, and the Jacobite rebellions.
His first major work to achieve widespread public acclaim was Rebel Hunting after Culloden, executed in 1884. It was praised not only for the obvious tension between the muscular blacksmiths and the red-coated forces of law and order, but for the extraordinary realism in the depictio