LOUISE INGRAM RAYNER (1832-1924)
Louise Rayner was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, one of the six daughters of the architectural and historical watercolourist Samuel Rayner. She was brought up mainly in London, and began to draw seriously at the age of fifteen, during a long stay at Herne Bay, in Kent. She received lessons from EJ Niemann, David Roberts and Frank Stone in addition to her father. She began exhibiting oil paintings at the Royal Academy in 1852, but soon turned to watercolour. She exhibited most consistently, from about 1860, at the Society of Women Artists.
Like her sisters, she often produced period interiors, but she also made a speciality of the old streets and alleys of the cathedral cities and market towns of England and Wales. These catered to a strong taste for the urban picturesque which developed in part in reaction to industrial development. Many of her most characteristic detailed views exploited the Rows of Chester, the city in which she lived between 1869 and at least 1891. Her frequent depiction of Watergate Street, as exemplified here, may have originated in the fact that her landlord was a chemist in the locality. At some stage she visited Northern France, where she painted a number of landscapes. She died at St Leonards-on-Sea, in Sussex.
