William Adolphus Knell

William Adolphus Knell was a London marine painter, probably the father of William Callcott Knell. Knell was born in Carisbrooke in 1801. He exhibited mainly at the British Institution between 1825 and 1867, at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1825–66 and also at Suffolk Street. Knell was one of the 19th-century marine artists who started to paint in the formalized Dutch tradition and appears towards the latter part of his career to have adopted an English school style. Most of his subjects are views of the English coast, and he also painted the French, Belgian and Dutch coasts occasionally including shipping vessels from a much earlier period. On the rare occasion that he painted galleons, he would paint them to their full, decorative splendor with rigging exposed and light flooding through to highlight every detail. In 1847, he won second prize in the Westminster Hall Competitions with his Destruction of Toulon 1793. Knell painted The Landing of the Prince Regent at Dover and The Review of the Fleet at Spithead for Queen Victoria. Knell died on July 9, 1875, in Kentish Town, London.