Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Burgess, William Oakley

1323504Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 07 — Burgess, William Oakley1886Robert Edmund Graves

BURGESS, WILLIAM OAKLEY (1818–1844), mezzotint engraver, was the son of the parish surgeon of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London. He was born in 1818, and early in life became a pupil of Thomas Goff Lupton, the well-known mezzotint engraver, with whom he remained until he was twenty years of age. He applied himself with great earnestness to the study of his art, and acquired so much delicacy in its practice that he would in all probability have attained a very high position in it had he not been prematurely cut off. His death, which took place on 24 Dec. 1844, in the twenty-seventh year of his age, was caused by an abscess in the head, supposed to have arisen from a blow of a skittle-ball some years before.

Burgess's best engavings are after the works of Sir Thomas Lawrence. They include a larger and a smaller plate of the Duke of Wellington, both of which are remarkable for their admirably graduated tones, as well as the portraits of General Sir John Moore and of Charlotte, duchess of Northumberland, which were published in the series of fifty plates of ‘Engravings from the choicest Works of Sir Thomas Lawrence,’ 1835-45.

[Historocal Register, 4 Jan. 1845; Art Union, 1845, p. 10l.]

R. E. G.