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FREDERICK WILLIAM LOCK (artist)
Frederick William Lock (active 1843-1863) is known primarily as a Canadian painter of portraits and landscapes. His medium was predominately pastel chalk crayon on paper; other of his works are in pencil, in ink and in watercolor. Lock began his art career in England as a copyist at the National Gallery, London, submitting art subjects to engravers for publications,and worked in the field as an illustrator of antiquities; all before emigrating to Canada in 1846. In "Lower Canada," Lock painted subjects in and around Montreal, Quebec (capital of the British Province of Canada), and worked his way westward into Ontario ("Upper Canada").

His Canadian artwork included line drawings and sketches for engravings and publications, landscapes of Chaudière and Rideau Falls near Bytown (renamed Ottawa in 1854); portraits and one landscape in Brockville, Ontario; portraits in and around Toronto; several views of Niagara Falls; and two views of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River.

Lock left Canada in 1862 and returned to his native England, reportedly to Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk. He is known to have worked and exhibited his works in London in 1863. Little is known of Lock's artwork produced after that date. Two of his latest paintings were reported sold at auction: a miniature dated 1877 (a copy of an earlier work by another artist), set in a locket, that was offered for sale in England in 2008, and a pastel portrait dated 1878, that sold at auction in Rome, Italy in 1989.

Beginnings in England
Lock is believed to have been born in England, likely about 1823 [date and place needed here]. As a youth he was enrolled at the National Gallery, London as a copyist (#1072), in 1841, by William Seguier, the first Keeper of the National Gallery. One surviving painting by Lock while at the National Gallery (c. 1841), is his copyist Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest, by Anthony Van Dyck. That copyist work by Lock was subsequently named Victorian Portrait of a 16th Century Bearded Gentleman with a ruff.

Two of Lock's earliest works in England are engraved mezzotints: The Bridal Morn (Queen Victoria; Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), engraved and published in 1841 by Samuel William Reynolds II also and Portrait: The Fair Domino, printed in 1844 by T W Huffam. Both prints are in the British Museum collections.

In 1845, Lock worked in Derbyshire and Staffordshire as an illustrator of antiquities under Thomas Bateman, a prominent Derbyshire archaeologist and borrow digger. This appointment was likely arranged through one of Lock's uncles, the Rev. Stephen Isaacson, M. A. of Derbyshire who like Bateman was a member of the British Archaeological Association. Lock also enrolled that year as a member of the Association. Accompanied by Bateman and Isaacson, Lock exhibited his "extensive series of drawings of weapons, ornaments, etc..." many of which had been "executed on the spot." Lock presented at least one paper, "Account of the Hermitage at Carcliffe, Derbyshire, near Robin Hood's Stride," to the association's Central Committee. An unknown number of watercolor illustrations and pen and ink sketches by Lock are included in Bateman's first book, Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire, 1848. .

Emigrates to Canada
In 1846, Lock emigrated to Canada where was welcomed in Montreal by another of his Uncles, Robert Phillip "Dolly" Isaacson. In Montreal, Lock began attracting clientele by copying portraits by other artists on display in the Parliament Building in Montreal. Two of Locks 1847 commissions were portraits: one of Major John Richardson, lithographed, for the book Richardson's War of 1812; and a pastel portrait of John Samuel McCord, father of David Ross McCord who founded McCord Museum, Montreal, Quebec.

Chronology of Lock's Paintings in Canada
In 1848, Lock painted a still life painting, The Artist's Possessions