My post on John Rogers Herbert seems to have struck a chord.   There is something slightly touching about this super earnest early Victorian with his long red hair ‘very smoothly brushed straight down’, converting to Catholicism and biblical hyper realism, painting scenes from the bible as if he had visited Palestine (maybe he had, but I haven’t found evidence of it), celebrating the fact that, as he described it, ‘the age of splash and dash is nearly over’, being employed to teach in the government schools of design, spending time in France and speaking forever thereafter with a strong French accent, admired by Gladstone, and dying in The Chimes in Kilburn (this is written with acknowledgement to Barbara Bryant’s excellent short life in the NDNB).