Eminent English painter, born in London; is distinguished as a painter at once of historical subjects, ideal subjects, and portraits; did one of the frescoes in the Poets' Hall of the Houses of Parliament and the cartoon of "Caractacus led in Triumph through the Streets of Rome"; has, as a "poet-painter," by his "Love and Death," "Hope," and "Orpheus and Eurydice," achieved a world-wide fame; he was twice over offered a baronetcy, but on both occasions he declined; b . 1817.