Howard Carter Art Brushstrokes

Howard Carter’s father, Samuel John Carter was a successful artist based partly in London and Norfolk. He specialized in painting animals and was the principal animal illustrator for the London News in 1867–89. He kept large animal pens at his London residence for study purposes and encouraged Howard in the basic skills of draughtsmanship, from an early age. When in Norfolk, Samuel carried out commissions for the local land-owners. One of the estates he visited, sometimes with his young son, was Didlington Hall, the country seat of William Tyssen-Amherst. The Amherst family held strong literary ties and antiquarian interests and possessed a notable library with a substantial Egyptian collection. For young Carter, who had already been engrossed in local natural history, visiting a house with such an extensive interest in ancient Egypt must have been stimulating. He later wrote that the Amherst collection, ‘aroused my longing for the country’s purity of her blue sky, her pale aerial hills and her valleys teeming with accumulated treasures of Age’. His acquaintance with the Amhersts proved fateful when the opportunity presented itself in 1891, they felt confident in recommending Carter for work in Egypt to the Egypt Exploration Fund. <a href="https://medium.com/@JamesGrantHay/howard-carter-art-brushstrokes-e80c27e8e852">Read More</a>