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Attributed Henry Edridge ARA - Original Early 19th Century Graphite Drawing. Graphite heightened with white chalk. On pale blue laid which has been laid down on backing paper. Inscribed indistinctly lower left. From a collection of drawings, one of which is attributed to Henry Edridge on the reverse. Unsigned. There are minor marks and creasing as shown.Henry Edridge ARA (1768 –1821) was apprenticed at the age of fifteen to William Pether, a mezzotint engraver and landscape painter. His first portraits were on ivory, and he subsequently turned to paper with black lead and India ink to which he added very ornate backgrounds, but he later produced a large number of elaborately finished pictures in water colours with light backgrounds. His subjects included Lord Nelson, the explorer Mungo Park, the Methodist missionary Thomas Coke, the Prime Minister William Pitt and John Wesley. Sir Joshua Reynolds was so taken with one of his miniatures, that he insisted on having it and paid him handsomely for it. This was the sign for Edridge to abandon engraving and become a painter. With the desire to indulge his taste for landscape painting, which he cultivated under Thomas Hearne, he made two excursions to Normandy and Paris, in 1817 and 1819, producing many interesting drawings which were subsequently exhibited. Three of his landscapes are now in the South Kensington Museum, and his sketches on the first Lord Auckland and of Robert Southey are in the National Portrait Gallery. He became a student at the Royal Academy in 1784 and was elected an associate in November 1820.
