About Heatherley's
Academic Overview
Heatherley's Staff
History of Heatherley's
 
Heatherley's School of Fine Art
Chelsea. Established 1845
 
 
Founded in 1845, Heatherley's is the oldest independent art school in London and is among the few art colleges in Britain that focus purely on portraiture, figurative painting and sculpture.
 
Burne Jones, Rossetti, Millais, Lord Leighton, Russell Flint, Michael Ayrton and Sickert are numbered amongst its former students as was the first Principal of the Slade School of Art, Sir Edmund Poynter and an early Principal of the Royal College of Art, Walter Crane.

Heatherley’s was the first school to admit women on equal terms with men.
 
In 1845, a group of students of the Government School of Design in Somerset House, unable to tolerate any longer the academic restrictions imposed on them, began to work as a separate class in Dickenson's Drawing Gallery, 18 Maddox Street. In 1848 'Dickenson's became Leigh's and moved to Newman Street with James Matthews Leigh as Principal.

When he retired, his pupil and assistant Thomas J. Heatherley took over the school and ran it for nearly thirty years without a break.


Left: Thomas Heatherley
Below: Glanville Fell and student in the Antiques Room