Explore: John Frederick, Jnr Herring

(1815/21 - 1907)

Born in Doncaster, John Frederick Herring Junior was a painter of sporting views and farmyard scenes. His father, John Frederick Herring Senior (1795–1865), was also a painter of similar scenes. In 1830 he moved with his parents to the hamlet of Six Mile Bottom, named after its distance from the start of the Newmarket racecourse, and later settled in Cambridgeshire. He married the painter Catherine Augusta (Kate) Rolfe (1828–1928), whose brother, A. F. Rolfe, was also an artist and had collaborated with Herring senior. Herring Junior did not have a good relationship with his father and was the only child not mentioned in his father’s will. This is thought to be a consequence of a dispute over whether Herring junior was encouraging his own work to be mistaken for the paintings of his father, generally considered a superior painter. Between 1860 and 1874, he exhibited 53 works at the Royal Society of British Artists, 15 at the Royal Academy and ten at the British Institution. In addition, 35 of his works were reproduced in The Sporting Magazine, the first English periodical devoted to every kind of sport. He died in Cambridge in 1907.