Painter, sculptor, ceramicist, writer and collector, born in Wavertree, Liverpool. His father was the wealthy merchant Philip Henry Rathbone (1828–1895), a leading figure in the late nineteenth-century Liverpool art world. His younger brother was the architect Edmund Hamilton Rathbone (1863–1924). In 1875 Harold relocated to London to study at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art and in 1878 entered the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was taught by Alphonse Legros (1837–1911). From 1883 to 1886 he was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) in Manchester. Finally, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. On his return to England, he began exhibiting landscapes, portraits and subject paintings at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions and the Liverpool Academy; at the Grosvenor Gallery, New Gallery and Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London; and at the Paris Salons. He was well known in the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1880s and 1890s and founded the Della Robbia Pottery Company in Birkenhead in 1894. In 1899 he designed and executed in glazed polychrome Della Robbia pottery the reredos for the Unitarian Church, Manor Road, Wallasey, designed by his brother, Edmund, in collaboration with Edmund Ware. Harold remained the Pottery’s principal manager and art director until its closure in 1906. He then moved first to Llandudno and later to the Isle of Man, where his sight deteriorated. His illustrated volume of poems, Dunvegan Castle, was published in 1900. He formed a notable collection, above all, of the works of Ford Madox Brown, which was dispersed long before his death. His son was Gabriel Della Robbia Rathbone.
Bibliography: AHRnet, via Art UK; M. Bennett, Merseyside, Painters, People and Places, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1978, pp. 175–76; R.F. Bisson, The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts, Liverpool, 1965, pp. 66–67; J. Carroll, ‘Renaissance to Regent Street: Harold Rathbone and the Della Robbia Pottery of Birkenhead’ (PhD thesis, published on the internet as a PDF), Liverpool John Moores University, 2017; Liverpool Daily Post, 14 December 1929; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 21, 121, 222–24; J. Robinson, Relatively Rathbone, Richmond, 1992, pp. 44, 67–68.
Emma Roberts, 2012; revised, Terry Cavanagh, September 2025
