Captain Edward HANDLEY-READ (1869-1935)

Handley-Read – father of Charles Handley-Read, the dedicated enthusiast for Victorian art, architecture and design and knowledgeable scholar about the work of William Burges – was an artist with a varied, lively, engaging style and a life to match.Born in 1870, Handley-Read had first studied at the Kensington School of Art (then, the National Art Training School, at South Kensington), which was distinguished, in the 1880s, by treating male and female students with a greater degree of equality than many other art schools of the day, concentrating, as it did, on studies of the human form, and allowing women to study the nude, as well as the draped, model. Handley-Read moved from here to the Westminster School of Art, which, from 1877 to 1893, was headed by Fred Brown and, by the late 1880s, was regarded as one of the most progressive art schools in London. Brown’s curriculum was, to a considerable extent, influenced by Alphonse Legr