James Sharples

Who was James Sharples?

James Sharples was an English blacksmith and self-taught artist and engraver. He is best known for his work The Forge, which he painted and then engraved in his spare time.

Sharples was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, into a large family of thirteen. His father was a blacksmith, as were both of his grandfathers. Sharples had little formal education and began to work as a smithy-boy in an iron foundry aged ten, later moving to work as a riveter in the engine shop where his father worked.

He discovered his artistic bent by helping the foreman to draw the designs for boilers on the workshop floor, and practised by copying lithographs and engravings in his spare time. Aged 16, he attended a drawing class at Bury Mechanics' Institution each week for three months. He learnt technique from John Burnet's Practical Treatise on Painting, asking his family to help him to read it, and then John Flaxman's Anatomical Principles and Brook Taylor's Principles of Perspective. He made his own easel and palette to attempt oil painting, walking the 18-mile round trip to Manchester to buy paint. He sold his first successful painting, a copy of an engraving entitled Sheep-shearing, for half a crown.