Valentine Cameron Prinsep
Date of birth: 1838 — Date of death: 1904
Artist. Son of Henry Thoby Prinsep (1792-1878) an Indian Civil Servant and author and Sara Monckton (1816-1887). Prinsep was educated at Haileybury College. He was a friend and associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Princep was invited by Rossetti to contribute to the decoration of the union debating hall in Oxford in 1857. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy with How Bianco Capello Sought to Poison her Brother-in-Law the Cardinal de Medici (1862). He was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1878 and a royal academician in 1894. Princep became friends with the novelist George Du Maurier (1834-1896) and Maurier used Princep as a model for his character Taffy in the novel, Trilby (1894). Maurier introduced Princep to the St John's Wood clique, a group which had a major influence on works such as The Linen Gatherers (1876). He married Florence Leyland in 1884 - the daughter of Frederick Richard Leyland (1831-1892) who was a patron of Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).