Richard Burchett (1815 - 1875). Richard Burchett was a British artist and educator on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who was for over twenty years the Headmaster of what later became the Royal College of Art. He was later described as a prominent figure in the art-schools, a well-instructed painter, and a teacher exceptionally equipped with all the learning of his craft by his ex-pupil, the poet Austin Dobson. Burchett's pupils included the extremely varied talents of Kate Greenaway, Christopher Dresser, Elizabeth Thompson, Sir George Clausen, Sir Luke Fildes, Gertrude Jekyll, Hubert von Herkomer, William Harbutt and Helen Allingham. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Queen Victoria's daughter, and a talented artist, was also a student. As an artist he achieved some reputation for large history paintings, and decorated public buildings including parts of the Palace of Westminster and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but his View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight is seen by modern art historians as his best work. Burchett published collections of his lectures as text-books for the South Kensington system of art education, which he helped to devise. Burchett was born in Brighton on 30 January 1815. He attended the London Mechanics Institute in Chancery Lane, before in about 1841 entering the Government School of Design, founded three years before in 1837, which he was later to head, and which eventually became the Royal College of Art. In 1845 he was a ringleader of students protesting to the Board of Trade about the teaching methods, in what was at the time a controversy that attracted a great deal of public attention, and finally a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry. He gave evidence to this in 1846-7, by which time he had become a master at the school, remaining on the staff until his death in 1875, from 1852 as Headmaster. Burchett spent most of his time throughout his adult life on his work at the school, and that his most highly regarded work today is an atypical landscape subject is an indication of how much his personal painting was neglected for teaching, and public commissions through the school. According to the Memoirs of William Bell Scott, who had worked under him, Burchett was: an able, self-dependent actor in the affairs of life, yet one whose action was rarely to his own benefit, although largely to the benefit of those under him in his official position. In the mid-1850s Burchett converted to Roman Catholicism; it is presumed that he was influenced by the already-converted Pre-Raphaelite James Collinson, with whom he was living after Collinson's engagement to Christina Rossetti had broken down for the second time. He married twice, and had several children. What appear to be a son and grandson are recorded exhibiting paintings in London. Ebenezer Stanley Burchett worked at South Kensington and then was Head Master of the Bedford Park School of Arts & Crafts. In 1870 Richard Burchett is described as formerly of 43 Brompton Square, but now of 8 Bedford Road, Clapham. Burchett was in very bad health for the last years of his life, and when he died in Dublin, on 27 May 1875, he was staying with his wife's uncle, Sir Samuel Ferguson, for his health. He had only been in the School for 133 days in 1872, arriving punctually on only seven of these. In 1870, he began proceedings for bankruptcy, which were still not concluded by his death. Scott says he took to a sort of farming at considerable expense. He began to get into deep water, and into the hands of 20 per cent money-lenders. Still he fought bravely with his difficulties, and even when his large salary was placed under trustees, he went on with his historic subjects. His will was probated at less than E200, and Frayling records that a letter from his widow asking for a pension was found unanswered in the school files thirteen years later. Obituaries were published in the Athenaeum, the Art Journal, and The Graphic. Burchett exhibited five works, apparently all large history paintings, at the Royal Academy between 1847, including The Death of Marmion, famous in its day according to Hugh Thomas and 1873. These are rather generously described as in the Pre-Raphaelite style by the DNB. He exhibited a work at the British Institution in 1855.