Frederick George Cotman was born in Ipswich in 1850. At the age of 18 he entered the Royal Academy School. He began his career as a portrait painter and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. Two years later he won a Gold Medal for historical painting.
He then turned to painting interiors and landscapes in addition to portraits. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, he was awarded a Silver Medal.
The artist lived in London for a time and travelled extensively. Later in life he returned to East Anglia and maintained a studio in Felixstowe.
One Of The Family is one of Cotman's most famous paintings, and depicts a delightful family around a table eating a meal. The models used by Cotman for this scene were an actual family, named Street, who lived in the north of England. The child on the bottom right of the picture emigrated to New Zealand when she was sixteen, and now a whole family of descendants of this child in New Zealand proudly own copies of the painting.
