Author Description

Calderon wanted to study engineering, but he became so fond of technical drawing and diagrams that he changed his mind and turned to art. In 1850 he studied at Leigh's Art School in London, after which he traveled to Paris in 1851 to study with Picot. His first successful painting was From the Waters of Babylon (1852), which was followed by an even more popular one entitled Broken Vows (1856). Broken Vows, which by its sentimentality won him the love of the English public, was followed by a number of other paintings, varied in content and distinguished by the naturalness and liveliness of composition, the expressiveness of figures, and the solidity of painting, such as "The Prisoner's Daughter", "French Peasants", "French Peasants Who Found Their Missing Child," "Liberation of Prisoners," "Marriage Proposal" (1861, one of the best works of the artist), "After the Battle," "The British Embassy in Paris on the Evening Before Night of Bartholomew" (1863), "Young Lord Hamlet" (1868), "Spring, Chasing Autumn," "The Queen of the Tournament" (1874). From the beginning, he was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, and some of his works show the level of detail, depth of color, and realistic forms typical of this style.In 1872 he exhibited at the Royal Academy a portrait of the artist Henry Stacy Marks, his friend and brother-in-law.Calderon became a prominent member of the St. John's Wood Clique, a group of artists interested in the modern genre and historicism and inspired, both artistically and socially, by the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Historical, biblical, and literary themes were common in his later work. Many of his paintings depicted women wearing rich silk clothing surrounded by graceful, colorful landscapes. For example, Morning (1884) depicts a red-haired girl admiring a sunrise. His Juliet (1888) shows the Shakespearean Juliet sitting at her balcony while she looks up at the stars. In his later paintings, he adopted a more classical style, comparable to that of Edward