Charles William Sherborn (1831-1912)
Biography:
Charles William Sherborn was born on 14 June 1831 at 43 Leicester Square, London, the eldest son of Charles Sherborn (b. 1796), an upholsterer, and his wife, Mary, the daughter of Richard Bance, of Newbury. He was educated first at a local school and then at Cave House, Uxbridge. In 1845 he left school and began attending the government school of drawing and design at Somerset House, while at the same time being apprenticed to Robert Oliver, a silver-plate engraver in Rupert Street, Soho. In October 1852, having served his apprenticeship, he went abroad, staying in Paris from some ten months and afterwards travelling in Italy. In September 1853 he settled in Geneva, where he remained for three years, working as a goldsmith's designer and engraver. He returned to London in September 1856 and began engraving for the London jewellers, first in his father's house, and then in Jermyn Street, in a partnership which proved unsuccessful and was dissolved in 1860; however, the same year he began again in Warwick Street, Regent Street. On 14 August 1860 he married Hannah Simpson (d. 1922), the daughter of Thomas Davies, a watchmaker, and the widow of Thomas Wait, a draper, of Liverpool; they had four sons, including the geologist Charles Davies Sherborn (1861-1942), and a daughter.
In 1872, on account of financial difficulties, Sherborn abandoned business and decided to work independently as an etcher and engraver. His early training had been limited, and it was chiefly with reproduction work after contemporary portrait and subject painters, and later on with bookplates, that he gained a livelihood. He had always undertaken original work for his own pleasure, and his etchings of London architecture and riverside deserve praise for their sincerity. Chelsea, Westminster Abbey, and Battersea Bridge were all published by E. Parsons. His finest achievement is a series of more than 350 bookplates which he designed and engraved chiefly between 1881 and 1912. They are mostly of the armorial type, but some are pictorial and a few are portraits. A contemporary remarked after his death that his mastery of fine engraving technique was unrivalled among the working engravers of his time, and came into its own in reproducing these formal and intricate designs. Between 1874 and 1894 he exhibited plates regularly at the Royal Academy; these were mainly portraits and some allegories and mythological subjects, including Pope Pius IX (1876), Allegory of Life and Death (1878), Apollo, God of the Sun (1881), and The Earl of Carlisle (1894), after Henry T. Wells.
Sherborn was elected a member of the Society of Painter–Etchers in 1884. He died at his home, 1 Finborough Road, South Kensington, London, on 10 February 1912, and was buried in Highgate cemetery on 14 February. He and his family presented a complete set of his bookplates, engravings, and etchings to the British Museum, and representative selections of the bookplates to the national collections in France, Germany, and the United States.
Title: The Thames
Materials: Etching on paper
Signed in pencil lower right
Size: 7.5 x 20cm
Price: £75
Title: The Burlington Fine Arts Club Library
Materials: Engraving on paper
Signed in pencil lower right
Size: 15 x 9cm (image/plate); 27 x 18cm (sheet)
Price: £49.99