Artist: George Percy Jacomb-Hood (British, 1857-1929)
Title: The Gentle Knight, from the first canto of the Faerie Queene
Medium: Antique etching on thick laid paper.
Signature: Signed in the plate.
Dimensions: Image size 6 x 7 7/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 15 x 17 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he never wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
George Percy Jacomb-Hood was a painter, etcher and illustrator. He was a founding member of the New English Art Club and Society of Portrait Painters. G P Jacomb-Hood was born on 6 July 1857 at Redhill in Surrey, the fourth of nine children (two of whom died in infancy) of Robert Jacomb-Hood (1822-1900) and Jane Stothard Littlewood (1827-1869). His grandfather, a yeoman farmer in Essex was born Robert Jacomb (1794-1857), but was a cousin of William Hood, the last male member of his family, who left his estate at Bardon, Leicestershire to him on condition that he took the additional surname of Hood, the estate having been in the Hood family since the 1620s. His father was Chief Engineer on the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway from 1846-1860. Jacomb-Hood was educated at Tonbridge School and the Slade School of Fine Art as well as studying while touring abroad in Paris and Madrid. He was a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, the Savile Club, was Honorary Treasurer of the Chelsea Arts Club, member of the New English Art Club and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. G P Jacomb-Hood married The Hon Henrietta Kemble de Hochepied-Larpent (1867-1941), daughter of the eighth Baron de Hochepied-Larpent on 28 June 1910. Known as Reta, her sister The Hon Sybil Marguerite Gonne de Hochepied-Larpent, OBE (1867-1941) married Philip Napier Miles and Jacomb-Hood was a friend of his cousin Frank Miles. Another sister, The Hon Clarissa Catherine de Hochepied-Larpent, married the soldier and artist Colonel Robert Charles Goff. The Jacomb-Hoods lived in Chelsea after Frank Miles’s death when Jacomb-Hood’s father bought Miles’s house in Tite Street from his executors. and also had a house in Rye, East Sussex. Jacomb-Hood regularly produced illustrations for the The Graphic who gave him a number of overseas assignments. In 1896 the magazine sent him to Greece and to Delhi in 1902. He accompanied the Prince and Princess of Wales on their 1905 tour of India and was a member of George V’s personal staff on his 1911 tour of India. He wrote an autobiography in 1925, entitled With Brush and Pencil. He died on 11 December 1929 at Alassio.