Hubert von Herkomer

Herkomer was a painter who founded an art school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, in the 1880s. His film company produced only a handful of films, of which not a single can appears to have survived. He was widely credited with pushing cinema to new artistic heights, with bringing down the pace of the action to a more realistic speed and with taking more care than most with his period costumes and settings. He commissioned scripts from literary sources, notably the novels of Marie Corelli and Thomas Hardy, but none of these seem to have made it on to the screen.