One of the most popular of English genre-painters, born in London on the 19th of October 1794. His parents were American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son was educated and afterward apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however, mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor, from recollection of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge, and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed “high art,” and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor; but he soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of Wilkie, with the contemporary life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Molière, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify Sir Roger de Coverley Going to Church, 1819; May-day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, 1821; Sancho Panza and the Duchess, 1824; Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadham, 1831; La Malade Imaginaire, act iii. sc. 6, 1843; and the Duke’s Chaplain Enraged Leaving the Table, from Don Quixote, 1849. In 1821 Leslie was elected A.R.A., and five years later full academician. In 1833 he came to America to become teacher of drawing in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome one, and in some six months he returned to England, where he practiced his profession with unfailing assiduity till his death on the 5th of May 1859. See also The Memoir of John Constable.
