Name Augustus Fox | Died 1895 | |
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Occupation ArtistPortrait painter Known for Exhibiting at the Royal Academy | ||
Augustus Henry Fox (c. 1822–1895) was a painter who exhibited three works at the Royal Academy.
Although Fox exhibited at the Royal Academy, little else seems to have been recorded about him until 2010, when an oil painting signed "A. H. Fox", depicting an unidentified bearded man in civilian dress, which had been found discarded in a waste skip, was put up for sale on the BBC television programme Flog It!. Although the canvas was described as being in good condition (the frame was damaged), it was auctioned for only £40. Other works by Fox have been sold at some of the most prestigious auction houses, including Bonhams.
Among his sitters were Francis Aspinal Philips, who was High Sheriff of Radnorshire in 1851, Philips' wife Jane, Sir Edward Watkin, 1st Baronet, MP and various members of the Rymer family, notably Thomas Rymer of Calder Abbey and the Dutton Estate Ribchester (Rymer purchased Calder Abbey for £44,200 in 1885, eleven years after the portrait) and Thomas Harrison Rymer, Esq. (1874), a commissioning agent and later a Justice of the Peace, who inherited the estate on Thomas Rymer's death (1902) (Farrer W. & Brownbill J. 1912. A History of the County of Lancaster. Volume 7 pp. 45–51). T H Rymer would hold the seat at Calder Abbey, Cumberland as well as another at Letton Lodge, Broughton Park, Manchester and would become High Sheriff of Cumberland in 1910 until his death on 13 April 1911. Fox's work shows T H Rymer as a young, distinguished man seated upright at a desk with documents. It is unusual in the context of much of Fox's portraiture work in that it shows the sitter in profile, focusing on the youthful distinction of the subject's face and surrounded by an aura.