Portrait of the Artist

'Miss Sharples's pictures - 2 of them sold at an auction to Mr. Dance who knows nothing of painting for £50 - she had previously sold them to another simpleton for £150 or thereabouts who broke down afterwards'. (George Cumberland)

This rather patronising quotation illuminates Rolinda Sharples's position within the Bristol art scene. As a woman she would have had restrictions on her social life, and so did not join Rippingille, Bird and the others in the sketching group. However, she was connected to them in other ways for she knew Cumberland's daughter Eliza and Dr King's wife and daughters, and Cumberland had provided her with an introduction to the artist Thomas Stothard when she visited London in1814. She was born in Bath in 1793 and came from a family of artists, spending some of her childhood in America when her father James worked there as a pastel portraitist. On his death in 1811 the Sharples family returned to Britain and settled in Bristol. The family continued the portrait business and Rolinda Sharples painted portraits and genre (paintings of the everyday life of the times, which often tell a story or teach a moral) throughout her life. She was able to make a living from painting and exhibited her work throughout the country.

It was unusual for a woman artist to specialise in genre painting and Sharples seems to have had only one British precursor, Maria Spilsbury (1777- about 1823). The Cloak-Room, Clifton Assembly Rooms, 1817-18 shows Sharples at her best, as a chronicler of middle-class life in Bristol. She could be over-ambitious in her choice of subjects, painting over 150 figures in The Trial of Colonel Brereton during 1832-34 after the Bristol Riots. Like Bird and Rippingille, she used portraits of real people in these multi-figure paintings. In 1827 the Society of British Artists elected her an Honorary Member. She died of breast cancer at the age of 44 and with her untimely death there was no artist to carry on the tradition of Bristol genre paintings.