Henry Perlee Parker (1785–1873) was an artist who specialised in portrait and genre paintings. He made his mark in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1820s through patronage by wealthy landowners and through paintings of large-scale events of civic pride. Over a period of forty years his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in London. Coastal scenes of fisherfolk and smugglers were a popular specialism. Through the distribution and sale of mezzotint prints of subjects such as William and Grace Darling Going to the Rescue of the SS Forfarshire, Parker became one of the north-east's best-known nineteenth-century artists. In Newcastle upon Tyne he was central to the setting-up of a Northern Academy for the Arts. Later, in Sheffield, he taught drawing at the Wesleyan Proprietary Grammar School, and in his later years he lived in Hammersmith, London. He had a large family and was married three times. Early life Henry Perlee Parker (1795–1873), portrait and genre painter, was born at Plymouth Dock, Devonport, on 15 March 1795. He was the son of Robert and Mary Elizabeth Parker – the name ‘Perlee’ comes from his paternal grandmother, who was French. His father was a teacher of ‘marine and mechanical drawing’. After leaving school, Henry was considered for training as a tailor, then was employed in a coachbuilder's workshop before he set himself up as a portrait painter. In the early 1810s he accompanied Charles Sandoe Gilbert (1760–1831) on sketching tours of Cornwall and saw paintings in the private collections of noblemen. He became acquainted with smugglers on the Cornish coast. In 1815 Parker married Amy Morfey, and following a stay with relatives in Sunderland they decided to move to Newcastle upon Tyne as Parker had taken ‘such a liking to that town he resolved to try his fortune there’. With five pounds between them, artist and wife found lodgings. He earned money by teaching drawing, painting window blinds, and executing small portraits on tin. By the autumn of 1816 their first child, Mary Perlee Parker, was born. Portraits and Fancy Pictures Newcastle – made wealthy from mining, shipbuilding and engineering – was undergoing a huge expansion of population at this time. Parker was aware of the importance of self-publicity for an artist and the need to ‘network’. He displayed examples of his work in a prominent shop window with the notice: ‘Likenesses done in this style at