John Emery was born on 16th November 1802 at Hanley, in the Staffordshire potteries. A Roman Catholic and local Freemason, he exhibited locally from the early 1830s, including some religious subjects, but primarily as a portraitist. A portrait of Thomas Brutton, a notable local mason and governor of Staffordshire Gaol, was reproduced as a good quality mezzotint by Samuel Reynolds junior in 1842 (copy in the National Portrait Gallery) and a full-length portrait of the pottery manufacturer Charles Meigh was critically praised when shown at the Manchester Royal Institution in 1853 (Manchester Examiner and Times, 16th November). His last noted work was a portrait of his son John, a piano dealer and musician, who became Mayor of Hanley for 1883. He presented this to the borough late that year and in 1882 another donor presented one of Hanley’s first mayor, John Ridgway (d.1860), for hanging in the Council chamber.
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Emery also seems to have done some copies: Othello Relating his Adventures (Potteries Museum) is an 1879 copy from either Douglas Cowper’s original (1839) or a known print of it. The 1851 census, when he was living at 3 High Street, Shelton, Stoke on Trent, lists two of his children as apprentices to a pottery painter and a cabinet maker. Though continuing to paint likenesses into the 1880s, by the early 1860s he was also advertising himself as a ‘photographic artist’, as photography began to affect the demand for painted portraits: local press adverts for 1862 show his photographic ‘Portrait Rooms’ at 9 Albion Street, Hanley (Staffordshire Advertiser, 21st June). In the 1891 census he is referred to as a ‘Sculp Artist (Portrait Painter)’ but there is no evidence that he was a sculptor and he is not to be confused with the sculptor John Emery (c.1825–1895) of London and Lichfield. Emery died at Hanley on 3rd January 1893: the probate value of his estate, just over £65, suggests his prosperity was limited. Eleven works in the Potteries Museum include three self portraits, and family portraits of his daughters.
Text source: Art Detective
