Frank William Scarbrough

British fl. 1890 - 1939

Frank Scarbrough was a London artist who settled in Lincoln in 1908. He painted mainly in watercolours, often taking as his subject matter the busy shipping in the Pool of London, where ocean-going liners battled for space with soot grimed tugs and barges in the murky waters of the Thames. On other occasions he painted quite atmospheric pictures, which were often done in the late afternoon when he captured the different reflections on the water in places such as Whitby Bay.

Scarbrough belongs to that group of Edwardian artists who worked until the 1930’s and include such well known marine artists as Charles Napier Hemy, William Lionel Wyllie and Charles Dixon. Apart from Hemy, who was in a class of his own, Scarbrough was probably the most interesting of the group, because his work was painted in an impressionistic style that owed nothing to the traditional style of marine painting, but was influenced by the work of Albert Marquet or Camille Pissarro’s “The Docks of Rouen, Morning”.