Appendix E: Biographies

Chapman

The Chapman family were friends of John and Eliza Winstanley (see Image 40), and neighbors on Fishergate.1 The father of the family, James Chapman (9 April 1791 – Preston 20 May 1861), entered the Royal Navy on 1 October 1805, as first-class volunteer. He attained the rank of midshipman on 22 June 1806, and, except for a period of about four months in 1809–1810, served under Captain Robert Campbell from 1805 until July 1814. Having passed his examination on 4 December 1811, he was promoted to lieutenant on 24 October 1814. “He was placed on half-pay, after serving for some time at the blockade of the Chesapeake, August 16, 1815,” and was not since that time “officially employed.” His name appeared “as a supernumerary for passage, on the books of no fewer than 73 ships of war, owing to the circumstance of his having been appointed Master of 18 or 19 different prize-vessels.”2

He seems next to have worked as a master of merchant ships until 1830. In 1818 and 1826, he wrote to the Admiralty concerning leave from the Navy in order to take command of merchant ships sailing from Liverpool to Calcutta belonging to Messes. Cropper, Benson and Company of Liverpool.3

He then became a railway company secretary. On 16 June 1830, at the first general meeting of the Wigan Branch Railway Proprietors, he was appointed treasurer, secretary, and superintendent of the railway at a salary of £300 per annum.4 In October 1833, it was resolved that the Wigan Branch Railway Company and the Preston and Wigan Railway Company be consolidated to form the North Union Railway Company.5 At the first meeting of the new North Union Railway Company on 4 June 1834, it was resolved that James Chapman be offered the office of secretary with a salary of £500 per annum, which he accepted.6 Among the names associated with this railway company were Charles Swainson, John Winstanley and Edward Cropper (see abovementioned merchant ships). The final memo by James Chapman, dated 1 April 1856, states that he left the Company’s service.7 He died at Preston on 20 May 1861, aged seventy, leaving effects under £16,000.8

On 31 October 1826, he married Eliza Hatton (1805 – Preston 18 February 1850), third daughter of Thomas Hatton, Esq., a Liverpool wine-merchant. They had three daughters and six sons:9 Emily (20 July 1828 – Liverpool 25 September 1909), Rose Walbran (18 September 1829 – 9 March 1905), Eliza Adelaide (20 November 1830 – 28 March 1901), James Gregson (1 June 1832 – 20 October 1902), George Robert (18 July 1833 – 4 May 1880), Edward Charles (b. c. 1834; bap. 16 January 1835), Alfred (b. c. 1838 – 11 July 1917), Valentine Walbran (b. c. 1842; bap. 13 October 1848 – 1 May 1915), and Thomas Skipwith (b. c. 1844; bap. 13 October 1848 – after June 1881).10 On 18 February 1850, Eliza (Hatton) Chapman died of tuberculosis, leaving her husband with nine children.

The beginnings of what were to be life-long friendships between the Chapman and Whistler children are recorded almost immediately upon the latter’s arrival in Preston. In August 1843, James and Willie “went with the little sons of Mr. Chapman to ride on their donkey.” The bouquets for Deborah Whistler’s (see Images 17–19, 21) wedding in October 1847 were the gift of Mrs. Chapman. The only guest who attended the wedding service, aside from the bride’s family, was a Chapman child called Johnnie, who may have been James.11 In the autumn of 1848, James Whistler (see Images 24–29) and George Chapman, both fourteen, “were sent to a school at Portishead, near Bristol.”12 “George Chapman, who developed a talent for portraiture, remained on close terms with [James] Whistler for most of his life.”13 Thomas Chapman also painted. He “was invalided out of the navy,” later “went to Sarawak for the climate … where after ‘commanding’ Rajah Brooke’s ‘Army’ for a while he died.”14 An undated letter from James Whistler to Tom Chapman, presumed to have been written in summer 1881, around the time Tom was invalided out of the Navy, explains to him how to paint a portrait.15 Emily, who did not marry, recorded in her diary, covering the years 1857–1893, that James Whistler and her family had “regular contact.”16 Edward, whose age was given as six in the 1841 Census for Preston, is probably the Charles whose age in the 1851 Census is given as sixteen, and who is listed as “surgeons pupil.” The Medical Register for 1860 contains the name of a Charles Edward Chapman, who became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1857, joined the Register in 1859, and had as his address the Islington Workhouse, where presumably he was the medical officer.17 He last appears in The Medical Register in 1872, with the same address.18 A curious fact of his biography is that both he and Alice Thornton Chapman, a child adopted by the Shaw sisters (see Shaw and Wardrop in this Appendix), were associated with Islington.19 He “recommended [James] Whistler to make a recuperative journey to the Pyrenees in 1862, after he had supposedly absorbed white lead while painting The White Girl.”20

Eliza Adelaide Chapman married on 20 August 1851 John Gerald Potter (Dinting, Derbyshire July 1829 – London 9 January 1908), who, together with his father, ran a wallpaper-manufacturing business in Darwen, Lancashire, with London and eventually Paris branches and “a large foreign trade.”21 Her brother, Alfred, was apprenticed as a mechanical engineer in 1854, and later specialized in designing sugar-processing plants, which resulted in an international career.22 Both John Gerald Potter and Alfred Chapman became major collectors of James Whistler’s works.23

Notes