Edward Harrison Compton (1881-1960) was a German landscape painter of English descent who continued, into the twentieth century, the tradition of Alpine mountain painting established by his father, the celebrated painter and mountaineer Edward Theodore Compton. Born in Feldafing, on Lake Starnberg in Upper Bavaria, where his father had settled after emigrating from England, Edward Harrison received his earliest artistic training directly from his father before continuing his studies at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He returned to Bavaria to work as a painter and book illustrator, and, like his father, was drawn above all to the Alps as his defining subject, working in both oils and watercolour.
An attack of poliomyelitis at the age of twenty-eight left Compton reliant on a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, compelling him to seek out more accessible motifs than the high mountaineering routes his father had climbed and painted. He turned instead to the Alpine foothills, valleys, mountain streams, lakes and castles that could be reached without strenuous climbing, together with cityscapes and southern European landscapes encountered on his travels, all rendered in the bright greens and blues and the attentiveness to luminous natural light that characterise his mature work. He exhibited widely and successfully throughout his career, showing at the Royal Academy in London as well as at the Munich Glass Palace and the Munich Artists' Cooperative, and, together with his father, did much to popularise the Alps as a subject for a wider public, feeding directly into the growing culture of Alpine tourism during the early twentieth century. His style developed in close relationship to his father's, to the point that attribution between the two has sometimes proved genuinely difficult for scholars and dealers.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings of Edward Harrison Compton, including views of the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau massif, sit naturally alongside the gallery's substantial collection of works by his father, Edward Theodore Compton, allowing the two painters' closely related yet distinct treatments of the same Alpine subjects to be considered together. This father-and-son painting tradition, spanning some seventy years of direct engagement with the high Alps, represents a significant strand within the gallery's wider specialism in Alpine landscape painting.