Inchbold

 On a cold, grey, relentlessly rainy March day – one of far too many such days this month - it's good to be reminded of how glorious March can look when the sun is shining. I don't think many paintings capture the crispness and intense clarity of early spring sunlight as perfectly as John William Inchbold's Study in March, which lives in the Ashmolean.
  Inchbold was not one of the Pre-Raphaelites, but was clearly working along similar lines, and he attracted the praise and patronage of Ruskin, with whom he spent some time in Switzerland. Despite such patronage, he seems to have had a difficult career, perhaps reflecting a 'difficult' personality,  and he rarely had enough money for comfort.
  He was a fine painter of sea and sky, as in this view of Anstey's Cove in Devon...

And here he captures the sea and sky of Venice in the luminous On the Lagoon...

In Venice, Inchbold even found water indoors, sketching An Inundation at St Mark's in, appropriately enough, watercolour...

Inchbold spent much of his later life abroad, partly for financial reasons. According to his somewhat snooty Wikipedia entry, 'a year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent'. What those 'ordinary defects' were, we are not told. 
  He died in 1888 at the age of 57, and Swinburne, a long-time friend, wrote an effusive funeral ode for him. It begins 'If far beyond the shadow and the sleep/ A place there be for souls without a stain...'