John Frederick Herring jnr
1815-1907

The eldest son of an illustrious and famous father, J F Herring suffered all his life from the comparisons which naturally go hand in hand with such a relationship. From infancy he was apprenticed to his fathers studio and made to follow his fathers style and subject. The results did not always reach the quality of drawing that his father enjoyed and so Herring jnr was always in his fathers shadow.

However there was a stubborn streak of originality in John jnr's art and over the years he worked hard and diligently to nurture his own personal style as it evolved. John jnr refused to let his overbearing father sublimate and swamp his ideas and style. It is not surprising that as the years passed, relations between father and son deteriorated and shortly before his marriage to Kate Rolfe, John jnr moved to Fulbourn, near Cambridge.

Although John jnr is best known for his farmyard scenes, he did some very important research work in his early years. One project stayed with him for most of his life. He created a pictorial record of all the Triple Crown winners, the horses, their breeding, owners, trainers and jockeys. This enormous work was carried out in watercolour and although never published, it still exists in a private collection in the USA. It illustrates profoundly the stubborn desire to produce something of lasting interest and importance but John had to keep his project secret as his father would not have considered it a commercial proposition.

John jnr was literally surrounded by artists within the family. His mother was a member of the Society of Lady Artists, his uncle Benjamin (died age 26) and his two younger brothers Benjamin jnr and Charles were all artists who enjoyed varying degrees of success, labouring in the omnipresent shadow of their father.

John jnr exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1863-1873, at the British Institute 1864-1867 and occasionally at the Suffolk Street Gallery. On his day he did achieve very pleasing results and there are those who claim that his pictures were often mistaken for his fathers work. Certainly a lot of his better works do bear the signature "J F Herring snr" but it has never been proved that he was the perpetrator of such fraud and he would have been the first to admit that there could be no mistake in the identity of the author. Nonetheless John jnr works adorn many houses both sides of the Atlantic and do provide a precious insight into country life in the far off 19th Century.

Back