Albert Goodwin (1845 -1932) was a British landscape painter best known for his watercolours. He was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1845, the son of the builder, Samuel Goodwin, and his wife, Rosetta. On leaving school, he was apprenticed to a local draper, but after six months he left to take up painting.
Following the death of his first wife, Mary Ann, in 1869, Goodwin moved to London to work in the studio of Arthur Hughes. It was probably through Hughes that Goodwin met the critic, John Ruskin, and then gave him a lesson in watercolour painting. At about the time that he was elected an Associate of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, in 1871, Ruskin commissioned him to produced some landscapes of Oxfordshire. Then, in the following year, Ruskin took him and Arthur Severn on a three-month tour through Switzerland to Italy. Goodwin never forgot this introduction to alpine scenery, which remained for him a standard of beauty, or to the cities of Italy, which he revisited on numerous occasions. As if demonstrating the programme that Ruskin had laid out in Modern Painters, Goodwin looked increasingly to the example of Turner.
He was a hardworking and prolific artist, driven by religious belief and moral responsibility, to express his talent and provide for his family. He travelled extensively in search of varied, and often exotic, landscapes, and visited Egypt (1876), India (1895), the West Indies and North America (1902, 1912) and New Zealand (1917).
In 1860, at just 15 years of age, Goodwin exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy. Aged 31, he became an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) in 1876.
Working well into his eighties, Goodwin was a prolific artist and produced over 800 paintings. The wide variety of landscapes that he produced reflect his love of landscape and travel. The style in which the artist worked clearly reflects his admiration for Turner by whom he was strongly influenced. Through his career, he lived in London, Devon and Sussex. He died on 10 April 1932, outliving his second wife, Alice, by 16 years. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum, Tate, the V&A, The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester).