Horace Mann Livens is probably best known today for having painted the earliest recorded portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. Livens had become friends with his fellow student Van Gogh whilst studying at the Academy in Antwerp in 1885/86 and is known to have kept some contact with the Dutch artist after his move to Paris. Livens returned to England where he was a founder associate of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers which was founded in 1898 with Whistler as its first president. H.M.Livens’s own highly accomplished work as both painter and printmaker is now little known due to the fact that many of his works were lost during the blitz and a further group was destroyed in a fire at his widow’s home in Harrow in 1957. [
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