A landscape painter in oil, art teacher and at least occasional portraitist, born in January 1858 in Birmingham, probably at Handsworth on its north-western outskirts towards West Bromwich. The third son and fifth child of seven born between 1850/1851 and 1864/1865 to Francis Reily (1825–1887), a hardware and saddlery merchant, and his wife Emma Preston (1825–1912), Francis junior was preceded by two elder brothers and two elder sisters, then followed by two younger sisters. From at least 1871 until Francis senior’s death in January 1887, the family appears to have lived at 16 Weston Road, Handsworth, with his widow continuing there to her death in 1912 (registered at West Bromwich). In 1881, aged 23, Reily was already noted there as a ‘Teacher Art Master’ but was probably still training. In 1884 – and possibly for two or three years – he was apparently at the National Art Training School (NATS) in South Kensington and living at 12 Drayton Gardens, West Brompton. After the NATS became the Royal College of Art in 1896, he is known to have used ARCA (i.e. an associate of it) as a qualification post-nominal.
Reily’s earliest known exhibited works were two at the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, in 1884 and he showed two more there and four at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, by 1919. His only exhibit at the RA was in 1903, where he was rather misleadingly described by Algernon Graves (1906) as a ‘miniature painter’, since it was a Portrait of my mother in that format. It was an aspect of his work, however, since ‘some attractive watercolours and miniature portraits’ as well as landscape ‘sketches’ were among works he showed in the first exhibition of the Southport Art Association in 1902 (Manchester Courier, 18th October 1902). How long he taught at Southport is not yet known but it was probably a career employment and his landscape expeditions were apparently never very distant. The eleven paintings by him on Art UK – one being a portrait of an old man (possibly a Lancashire fisherman) – are all in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, and were bequeathed to it by his school-teacher daughter Amy Lilian (1896–1982), with one by Theobald Butler Gould (d.1918). Identified locations depicted in them and in press mentions of others are in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Herefordshire and Shropshire. Reily died at 68 Forest Road, Southport, on 14th April 1928, leaving ‘effects’ of just over £4,621 at probate, his widow being executor.
His immediately younger sister, Alice Louisa Reily (1862–1952) was also artistic and showed eight works with the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, between 1899 and 1910, all from their parental home at 16 Weston Road, Handsworth.
Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Could we confirm the location of this scene, possibly in Herefordshire?’
Text source: Art Detective
