[Joseph William Comyns]. English art critic and dramatist, born in London on the 1st of March 1849, his father being a member of an old Cumberland yeoman family. Educated at the university of London, he was called to the bar in 1869, but soon became a writer of art criticism for the Pall Mall Gazette and, after 1875, editor of L’Art. He also founded and edited the English Illustrated Magazine, and was associated with Charles Hallé in the founding of the New Gallery, an offshoot from the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1888. In his later years he engaged in theatrical enterprises, and he was the adapter, alone or in collaboration, of a good many plays, notably Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1882) and the version of King Arthur produced by Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum theatre in 1895. He published Some Eminent Victorians (1908) and Coasting Bohemia (1914), both containing reminiscences of his own early life and the people he had known. He died in London on the 12th of December 1916.
See J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by his wife (1920).
