The second son of landscape painter John Linnell, James Thomas Linnell trained at the Royal Academy Schools alongside his brothers John and William.
Like his father, James excelled at landscape painting, though his palette was notably brighter. He began with religious subjects but, by the mid-1850s, was exhibiting mostly pastoral scenes of peasants, farm laborers and children.
Many of Linnell’s landscapes were painted in and around the Redstone estate at Redhill, which his father had acquired in 1851 and where the entire family lived. In 1872, a critic observed: ‘It is so rare an occurrence to find a picture by any one of the Linnell family bearing the distinctive title of the place represented, that one would naturally be led to suppose the compositions are merely imaginary; but this, as a rule, is far from the case. Surrey, and the wealds of Sussex, supply the artists with the groundwork of most of their beautiful compositions, and the localities may generally be recognised by those who are well acquainted with them.’
Linnell exhibited at the Royal Academy almost annually from 1850 to 1888. His works are held in the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, The Whitworth in Manchester, regional museums across the UK, the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey and the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.
