Joshua Cristall's determination to become a painter, against his Scottish father's bitter opposition, reportedly led him at one point to try to live for an entire year on nothing but potatoes and water, an ordeal that seriously damaged his health but did not weaken his resolve. Born in Camborne, Cornwall, in 1767 or 1768, he was secretly encouraged and financially aided in his studies by his mother, herself a woman of education and taste, while his sister Ann Batten Cristall went on to become a published poet on friendly terms with Mary Wollstonecraft. After an unhappy apprenticeship to a china dealer at Rotherhithe and a further spell painting china in the Staffordshire Potteries, Cristall moved to London to pursue fine art in earnest, eventually gaining admission to the Royal Academy Schools, where he made rapid progress, and becoming personally acquainted with the collector Dr Thomas Monro, whose house served as an informal meeting point for the leading watercolour painters of the day.
In 1805 Cristall was a founder member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and unlike many of his watercolourist contemporaries, whose reputations rested chiefly on landscape, he distinguished himself principally as a figure painter, a comparatively unusual specialism within the Society. He served as its President in 1816, in 1819, and again continuously from 1821 to 1831, showing 376 works there over the course of his career. From 1822 Cristall and his wife Elizabeth left London for Goodrich in Herefordshire, where the surrounding scenery and the local fern-burners on Coppet Hill provided him with a rich and sustained source of subject matter for nearly two decades, before he returned to London following her death in 1839, continuing to paint and exhibit until his own death in 1847. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975, drawing some three hundred pieces from public collections.
The painting by Cristall held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, An Arcadian Idyll, reflects the pastoral, figure-centred subject matter for which he remains distinguished among his generation of British watercolourists, offering a genuine example of the specialism that set him apart within the Old Watercolour Society he helped found and repeatedly led.