William Simpson

William Simpson (1823–1899), the most widely travelled British watercolourist of the age and special artist to the Illustrated London News, reached the island in the suite of the Prince of Wales, on his tour of India in 1875 and 1876; his rapidly executed field studies, the medium in which he was most fully himself, carried Ceylon to a larger readership than that of any other artist here considered.

Simpson was born at Glasgow in 1823 and came to art through the trade, apprenticed to a firm of lithographers before he made his name with the Crimean War: his watercolours from the seat of war, worked up and issued as The Seat of War in the East, established the figure of the pictorial war correspondent and earned him the nickname ‘Crimean Simpson’. From 1866 he served the Illustrated London News as a special artist, and in that office he circled the globe, travelling in India, Tibet, Kashmir and the Himalayas across three years before the royal tour, and later reaching China, Afghanistan and beyond; a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, he set down what he saw with a reporter’s clarity and a traveller’s curiosity.

He was sent out in October 1875 to attend Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, on the seven-month progress through the subcontinent, and the royal party’s ship, HMS Serapis, made Colombo on 1 December 1875, so that Ceylon fell within the same voyage that carried him to Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and the hill courts. From the tour he brought back more than two hundred sketches, most in sepia touched with watercolour; over two hundred were shown at a Bond Street gallery in 1876, where the Prince of Wales bought fifteen and Queen Victoria afterward acquired four for Windsor. Forty-four of his Indian watercolours are today held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He published his recollections as an Autobiography in 1903, four years after his death in 1899.