3-065-683 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The late Mr. J. C. Schetky, artist, 1874. 'This artist, who died...at the great age of ninety-five,...came of an ancient Transylvanian family...When a boy, Robert Burns, his father's friend, begged him off a flogging for playing truant to sail toy ships at Leith...At seventeen he was already earning his living by teaching scene-painting. In 1801 he and his friend Francis Horne...walked from Paris to Rome, and accomplished the last 104 miles in two days. On his return from Italy he took up his residence at Oxford as a teacher of painting. Subsequently he was successively Professor of Drawing at the Royal Military College at Marlow (now Sandhurst), at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth (a position he held for twenty-five years), and at the dissolution of the college, in 1837, he was appointed Professor at the Hon. East India Company's College, Addiscombe, where he closed his public career by retirement in 1855. Visits to the Spanish peninsula when Wellington was there, to Ireland in the suite of George IV., and cruises with Queen Victoria, were among the incidents of the artist's long life...Schetky was a left-handed artist; and we should add that he was an accomplished musician and vocalist as well as painter'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.