Chester – The Cross Looking Towards Watergate Street
Chester – The Cross looking towards Watergate Street c1886/1903 by British Watercolor Artist Louise Ingram Rayner (1832 – 1924); a genre cityscape painter of the Victorian Era.
This is a genre scene painting of the late 1880 with a specific focus on Chester, a busy commercial cross section where we see people going about their daily business, men in horse drawn wagons moving goods and children crossing the street.
As we look farther down towards Watergate street we see all the residential, commercial and small shops that women as well as men are going into and coming out of; as other look on from windows an balconies at the activities below.
In the far background we can see a very large church that stands out against the blue clouded sky
Chester – The Cross Looking Towards Watergate Street is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image.
Information Below Derived From Wikipedia.org
Louise came from a family of painters. Her father Samuel Rayner (1806 – 1879) was a landscape painter and her mother Ann Rayner (née Manser) was an engraver on Ashford Black Marble.
Louise had four siblings; three sisters and one brother who were also artist; and at the age of fifthteen taking art lessons from her father and later from family artist friends which included George Cattermole, Edmund Niemann, David Roberts and Frank Stone.
In 1852 at the age of 20, she exhibited her first oil painting which was of a series of oil paints entitle The Interior of Haddon Chapel, that was shown at the Royal Academy; however from 1860 onward she switched her medium from oils to watercolor and exhibited her artwork for the next 50 years at the Society of Lady Artists, The Royal Academy, Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of British Artists; to name a few.
Louise traveled extensively during the summers of 1870s and 1880s, painting highly detailed and picturesque, British scenes that of the populated streets of cities and towns of the booming Victorian period.
