James Ashton
- Date of birth
- 1859
- Date of death
- 1935
- Notes
- James Ashton was born in 1859 on the Isle of Man, England. He grew up in the City of York where he was apprenticed to a pharmacist and attended the School of Art before gaining a scholarship to the National Art Training School (Royal College of Art) at South Kensington, London. At 17 he returned to York, taught art and worked as a gilder and carver. Ashton arrived in Adelaide, Australia in 1884 determined to become a professional painter. He spent 12 months looking for work before a job teaching art at Prince Alfred College enabled him to bring out his wife and son. He established the Norwood Art School in 1886 in two cramped rooms of the Norwood Town Hall where he taught sketching, china painting and painting in oil and watercolours. In 1895 he returned to England where he paid 240 pounds for three months lessons from Henry Moore, R.A., an eminent marine painter at York. He gained a diploma and on 28 June was elected a member of the Royal Society of Arts, London. Ashton was affiliated with the Royal Drawing Society and after his return to Adelaide via Europe and Egypt, instituted its examinations and much-prized certificates at Ashton's Academy of Arts, which he opened in Victoria Square in 1896. It later moved to Flinders Street, then Grenfell Street. Through the highly regarded academy, 'Jimmy' influenced many painters who later became well known: his son (Sir) John William, Gustave Barnes, Hans Heysen and Ivor Hele. Ashton insisted on basic proficiency in drawing: on the wall of his studio he hung a plaque inscribed “He that attempts to run before he can walk must surely stumble and fall”. His association with Prince Alfred College lasted nearly 40 years; he was a jovial popular teacher who allowed the boys to develop their own interests but encouraged them to copy early masters. In 1925 he presented the school with a valuable art collection and bequeathed his library to it. Ashton had presided in 1896 over the Adelaide Easel Club, a group of rebels dissatisfied with Adelaide’s Art Establishment. In 1912-14 he was a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. A trustee and honorary fellow of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts, he was its president in 1914-17 and vice president in 1931; in 1926 and 1929 he won the Society's seascape prize. He encouraged six South Australian country towns to begin art collections and his own paintings were bought by galleries in Broken Hill, Bendigo and Perth. In 1927 Ashton, a rubicund tubby figure with silver hair and waxed moustache, who usually wore a flower in his lapel, retired to live in a terrace by the sea at Brighton, Adelaide. Here, between nine trips to Ceylon and despite painful arthritis, he continued painting his favourite subject, the sea. He was an effective draftsman and a loving, careful observer of nature, though by later standards rather sentimental. Ashton died in Adelaide in 1935. His works are in collections of the South Australian Art Gallery and many Australian regional galleries. Source: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/
Works in the collection
James Ashton
James Ashton
James Ashton