OWEN, William, one of the ablest of English portrait-painters, was the son of a bookseller, and was born at Ludlow in Shropshire in 1769. After receiving a good education in his native town, he repaired to London at the age of seventeen, and began to study under Catton, the academician. He sent his first portrait to the Somerset House exhibition in 1792, at the time when Lawrence, Beechy, and Hoppner were in their palmiest days. The easy and elegant touch, and the clear and strong perception of character which the young artist displayed, soon exacted attention. William Pitt sat to him in 1798; and from that time the merits of Owen in portraiture began to be generally recognised. The portraits of the Duchess of Buccleuch, Sir William Scott, Cyril Jackson, the Bishop of Durham, and the Marquis of Stafford, came to be admired for their freedom, vigour, and excellent light and shade. Owen was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1806. The Prince of Wales made him his portrait-painter in 1810, and would have knighted him in 1813 had not the artist declined the honour. Meanwhile Owen had been rising to an equally high place in another province of his profession. His fancy sketches, especially that of "Peasants Resting by the Roadside," and that of "The Fortune-teller and the Lady," were remarkable for their exquisite delineation of ordinary life, and attracted crowds of admirers. Towards the close of his life, however, Owen found no time to indulge in these sportive exercises of the pencil, and was obliged to confine himself to portraiture. In 1818 his prosperity was at its height. The portraits he had painted amounted to nearly two hundred, and his income had risen to about £3000 a year, when an attack of disease shook the brush from his hand. He continued to linger on in great debility, till a dose of opium, which he had swallowed by mistake, put an end to his existence on the 11th February 1825. (Cunningham's Lives of Painters, &c.)