Born. 1850, Lincolnshire, England; Died. 1902, St. John's Wood, London, England.

Victorian painter of portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Matthew Ridley Corbet studied art at Heatherley's School of Art, London, a prestigious art school that focussed on figure painting and portraiture. Corbet then attended the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools. After completing his academic training Corbet quickly began a career as a portrait painter, examples of which appeared in several Royal Academy summer exhibitions; the first of which was in 1875.

Corbet's early work was highly influenced by George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), a well known Victorian painter. However, sometime during the early 1880s Corbet moved away from portraiture and instead pursued an interest in landscape painting, in particular those in Italy and North Africa. Whilst in Rome, Corbet joined a group of artist and sculptors, among them Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934), and associated himself with an Italian landscape painter named Giovanni Costa (1826-1903). It is at this moment where Corbet's landscapes become more refined and reveal a greater understanding of colour and atmosphere. In harnessing his newly discovered interest Corbet travelled across much of Italy and produced a number of rural Italian scenes, often panoramic in form and painted onto long, horizontal canvases. Such landscapes reveal his own deep fondness and personal attachment to the Italian countryside, and is perhaps most evident in his painting titled Val d'Arno: Evening (Tate Collection) which, although subdued in its palette, shows a high degree of colour treatment and understanding.

In 1891 Corbet married a fellow painter of Italian scenes, named Edith Murch (widow of the painter Arthur Murch), and together they spent much of the 1880s and 1890s between their studios in London and Rome, painting and exhibiting alongside one another. In his later works (c.1900), Corbet reintroduced figure subjects into his landscapes, as can be seen in the work A Loving Psyche Loses Sight of Love (Southwark Art Collection). This unification of figure and landscape subjects neatly brings together his somewhat disconnected practices, a move which brought him greater attention as an artist. Corbet was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1902.

Corbet is represented by a number of public collections including Tate, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Museums Sheffield, Usher Gallery (Lincolnshire), Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, and Harris Museum and Art Gallery. A portrait of the artist, painted by John McLure Hamilton in 1883, is held in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG1867).

(Benjamin Angwin - September 2014)