DIXON Charles

Charles Dixon 1872-1934 was an English painter, born at Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire on 8 December 1872. His father Alfred, active 1864-91, was a painter of domestic genre scenes. Very little is known about Charles’s early life although it is presumed that he learnt his craft from his father. He soon became a popular and successful painter of marine scenes, working in both oils and watercolours. His watercolour works, of which there are five in the National Maritime Museum, London, tend to be views of sea and coastal scenes.

His larger oil paintings record contemporary events at sea, such as his ‘Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee at Spithead, 1897’ and, after the First World War, ‘HMS Cardiff Leading the Surrendered German High Seas Fleet into Rosyth’ (both in the National Maritime Museum, London). He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the New Watercolour Society. He also contributed illustrations to The Graphic magazine and other periodicals. He was made a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1900. A keen yachtsman, he lived at Itchenor on the Sussex coast and died on 12 September 1934.