Topic: John Chambers

John Chambers (9 January 1852 – 10 July 1928) was a landscape, seascape and portrait painter in oil, tempera and watercolour, and an etcher and illustrator.

Chambers was born in South Shields and educated at the town's Union British School, where the pupils were particularly encouraged to draw ships and other nautical subjects. He joined the Tyne Pilot Service on leaving school but left before reaching manhood and decided to become an artist. Chambers enrolled at the Government School of Design in Newcastle upon Tyne and later went to study in Paris in the ateliers of Professors Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Le Febvre, before settling at North Shields as a professional artist.

He first began exhibiting in 1877, showing several examples at the South Shields Fine Art & Industrial Exhibition. He followed this by showing his "Partonhall and Harbour" at the Central Exchange Art Gallery, Newcastle in 1878 and was subsequently an exhibitor at the Arts Association Exhibition in Newcastle in 1879, 1881 and 1882 and the Gateshead Fine Art & Industrial Exhibition in 1883. In the following year he began an association with the exhibitions of the Newcastle Bewick Club which lasted just over a decade. In 1886 he sent his first of three works to the exhibitions of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, showing "The Deserted Mill". Chambers mainly exhibited on Tyneside for the remainder of his career, including exhibitions at the art clubs of South Shields,where he was a vice-president, Tynemouth, and from their inception in 1905, the Artists of the Northern Counties exhibitions at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne.