Matthew William Peters Rev
British, 1741-1814
English painter and Clergyman. Brought up in Dublin, where his father was a customs officer, he studied under Robert West at the Society of Artists drawing school. By 1759 he was in London, studying under Thomas Hudson; in that year he won a prize from the Society of Artists. From c. 1762 Peters travelled and studied in Italy. On his return to London in 1766, he exhibited at the Free Society of Artists two portraits of ladies in native Italian dress (untraced). He was again in Italy in 1773–4, mostly in Venice, and he was in Paris in 1775, and again in 1783–4. In the course of these trips abroad he studied and copied Old Master paintings, including works by Correggio and Peter Paul Rubens.
Early in his career Peters was a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists; later, he was elected ARA (1771) and RA (1778). He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and was one of the more prolific contributors to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. In mid-life, however, he turned his attention to the Church and was ordained in 1783. He was made rector of Eaton, Leics, and afterwards chaplain to George, Prince of Wales, and to the Royal Academy, from which he resigned in 1790. This respectable and pious later career is somewhat surprising, since the pictures by which Peters made his early name were coquettish half-lengths of under-dressed young women. Highly popular and often engraved, these pictures were also considered slightly risqué. In style, Peters broke from the stodginess of his master, Hudson, and equally from the prevailing current of Neo-classicism. His surfaces were rich and painterly, his colours lush and high-keyed. Venice and Correggio meant more to him than Rome and Antiquity. Gradually, his subjects became more decorous. For his diploma work he painted a light-hearted genre scene, Children with Fruit and Flowers (London, RA). His contributions to Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery drew their subjects mainly from the comedies, especially The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing (for illustration see Waterhouse, 18th C., p. 276). Towards the end of his career as a painter (from which he retired in 1788) he produced a few lugubrious sacred pictures, for example Angel Carrying the Spirit of a Child to Paradise (1782; Burghley House, Cambs).
Peter Walch. " Peters, Matthew William." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T066710 (accessed May 1, 2012).
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