John William Inchbold

John William Inchbold was born in Leeds on 29 August 1830 and died at Headingley on 23 January 1888. His father, Thomas Inchbold, owned and edited the Leeds Intelligencer. He studied under Louis Haghe, attended the Royal Academy from 1847 and by about 1852 was painting in oils in the Pre-Raphaelite manner.

His Dartmoor picture is The Moorland (Dewar-stone, Dartmoor), painted in 1854, oil on canvas, 356 by 533 mm. It is in the Tate (N01477), bequeathed by Sir J. Russell Reynolds in 1896. The title gives away the subject: it is Dewerstone Rock, above the River Plym.

In 1855 Ruskin reviewed the Royal Academy show and called a picture titled The Moorland by Inchbold "the only thoroughly good landscape in the rooms of the Academy". His entry never mentions the Dewerstone, and Victorian Web says it is not known whether that was the Tate picture. It probably was, but that is a guess.

A firmer link comes from 1850, when Inchbold showed a watercolour of the Dewar Stone subtitled "the favourite haunt of the poet Carrington". That is N. T. Carrington, who wrote Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem in 1826. Wikipedia says the 1854 painting draws on Carrington's poem and on Tennyson's Locksley Hall, but no source found shows either.