Edmund Morison Wimperis (1835-1900) was born in Chester. A landscape painter and watercolourist, he began his career studying wood-engraving, initially under Mason Jackson and subsequently with Myles Birket Foster. During these years he also worked as illustrator for numerous magazines, most notably the Illustrated London News.

However, partly due to his relatively weak figurative drawing, he gradually turned to landscape painting. His first watercolours showed the influence of Birket Foster, but his relationship with another artist, Thomas Collier, helped to broaden his style and he began to move away from his former tutor’s minute, stippled technique. Collier, who has been called Britain’s foremost watercolourist of the time (the watercolour expert Martin Hardie referring to him as “one of the supreme watercolour painters in England”) was Wimperis’ frequent painting companion in the late 1870s and 1880s. Both were firm advocates of working in the open air.

Wimperis was fond of windswept landscape scenes, a common subject of his paintings. Hardie said of him that “…he painted expansive landscapes with breadth and decision; he dealt tenderly with the form and movement of spacious skies and boldly with fleeting shadows cast over broken ground”.

Wimperis went abroad only once to St Malo, Brittany. He painted prominently in the Thames Valley, the South Downs, Devon, Wales, East Anglia, and St Ives. He became a member of Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1875 and was voted Vice President in 1895. Besides the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, examples of his work are held by art galleries in Birkenhead, Bradford, Chester, Manchester, Newport, and Portsmouth.

Sources:

Martin Hardie, Watercolour Painting in Britain, Volume 2 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1971-5), pp.156-7

Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall (eds.), Victorian Landscape Watercolours (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Yale Centre for British Art, c1992), p.150