Henry Holiday

In late September 1881 Henry Holiday went to Florence to sketch along the Arno, because he felt he could not paint Dante's city without studying it on the spot. Back in London he modelled clay statuettes of his figures and even a clay model of the houses across the river. The picture that came out of all this, Dante and Beatrice, now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, shows the poet near the Ponte Santa Trinita as Beatrice walks past with her companions, a moment from Dante's early book La Vita Nuova. Holiday learned that late 13th-century Florence was paved with brick, and he copied the herringbone pattern from an example he found in Siena.

Painting was only one part of his working life. From 1861 he designed stained glass for James Powell and Sons, a London glassworks, stepping into the place Edward Burne-Jones had left, and he completed more than 300 commissions before opening his own glassworks in Hampstead in 1891. His windows went to Westminster Abbey and to churches in the United States, Grace Church in Manhattan among them.

In 1875 Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books, asked him to illustrate The Hunting of the Snark, a nonsense poem published the following year. Holiday was also a lifelong socialist, and with his wife Catherine and daughter Winifred he supported the campaign for women's suffrage.