s Sir Albert Kaye Rollit - Hull Museums Collections

Sir Albert Kaye Rollit

This painting is one of the many portraits that make up Hull's Guildhall Collection. It was painted for the UK Savings Banks in honour of Sir Albert Kaye Rollit, who was the first Chairman of their Statutory Inspection Committee from1891. He was also a President of the Law Society. The artist, Hubert von Herkomer, settled in London in 1870, and was achieving great acclaim as an artist by the mid 1870s. Initially he concentrated on genre and history painting and it was not until around 1880 that he began to paint portraits. He attained considerable success in France, winning several awards, and in 1879 he became a member of London's Royal Academy. He was influenced in part by the techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites, but evolved his own distinctive style in which he endowed the faces of his sitters with an extraordinary intensity of expression.