Charles napier hemy biography
By Linda Batchelor
‘It was imprinted on my mind and I never forgot it’
This was the impression of sea and ships gained by ten-year-old Charles Napier Hemy on a voyage to Australia and which developed for him into a lifelong fascination.
From Charles lived and worked as an artist in Falmouth. In a letter of explaining his move to Falmouth to fellow artist Luke Fildes he wrote ‘I have built my house here so as to paint nothing but sea and ships and do them always from nature’. He came to be regarded as one of the greatest marine painters of his era.
Portrait of Charles Napier Hemy, by John Singer Sargent, Falmouth Art Gallery.
The Hemy Family
Charles Napier was born in Newcastle on Tyne on 24 May into a musical family. His paternal grandfather Henry Hemi had come to Britain from Saxe Gotha, Lower Saxony in initially to serve as a musician in the Duke of Buccleugh’s Dumfries Militia. He had stayed in Britain changing his name to Hemy, had married in Scotland and settled with hi Charles napier hemy artist.