Explore: Henry Woods

(1846 - 1921)

Henry Woods is best known as a painter of Venetian scenes. He was born in Warrington in Lancashire and studied at the South Kensington Schools in London. Early in his career he worked as an illustrator for ‘The Graphic’ and he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1869. In 1876, at the suggestion of his brother-in-law, the highly successful painter Sir Luke Fildes, Woods visited Venice in search of new subjects. He was so taken with life in the city that he settled there permanently and devoted the rest of his life to painting scenes of everyday life in the streets and the canals.