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WOOLLETT, WILLIAM (1735–1785), English engraver, was born at Maidstone, of a family which came originally from Holland, on the 15th of August 1735. He was apprenticed to John Tinney, an engraver in Fleet Street, London, and studied in the St Martin's Lane academy. His first important plate was from the “Niobe” of Richard Wilson, published by Boydell in 1761, which was followed in 1763 by a companion engraving from the “Phaethon” of the same painter. After West he engraved his fine plate of the “Battle of La Hogue” (1781), and “The Death of General Wolfe” (1776), which is usually considered Woollett's masterpiece. In 1775 he was appointed engraver-in-ordinary to George III.; and he was a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, of which for several years he acted as secretary. He died in London on the 23rd of May 1785.

In his plates, which unite work with the etching-needle, the dry-point and the graver, Woollett shows the greatest richness and variety of execution. In his landscapes the rendering of water is particularly excellent. In his portraits and historical subjects the rendering of flesh is characterized by great softness and delicacy. His works rank among the great productions of the English school of engraving. Louis Fagan, in his Catalogue Raisonné of the Engraved Works of William Woollett (1885), has enumerated 123 plates by this engraver.

WOOLMAN. JOHN (1720-1772), American Quaker preacher, was born in Northampton, Burlington county, New Jersey, in August 1720. When he was twenty-one he went to Mount Holly, where he was a clerk in a store, opened a school for poor children and became a tailor. After 1743 he spent most of his time as an itinerant preacher, visiting meetings of the Friends in various parts of the colonies. In 1772 he sailed for London to visit Friends in the north of England, especially Yorkshire, and died in York of smallpox on the 7th of October. He spoke and wrote against slavery, refused to draw up wills transferring slaves, induced many of the Friends to set their negroes free, and in 1760 at Newport, Rhode Island, memorialized the Legislature to forbid the slave trade. In 1763 at Wehaloosing (now Wyalusing), on the Susquehanna, he preached to the Indians; and he always urged the whites to pay the Indians for their lands and to forbid the sale of liquor to them.

WOOLNER, THOMAS (1825-1892), British sculptor and poet, was born at Hadleigh, Suffolk, on the 17th of December 1825. When a boy he showed talent for modelling, and when barely thirteen years old was taken as an assistant into the studio of William Behnes, and trained during four years. In December 1842 Woolner was admitted a student in the Royal Academy, and in 1843 exhibited his “Eleanor sucking Poison from the Wound of Prince Edward.” In 1844, among the competitive works for decorating the Houses of Parliament was his life-size group of “The Death of Boadicea.” In 1846 he had at the Royal Academy a graceful bas-relief of Shelley's “Alastor.” Then came (1847) “Feeding the Hungry,” a bas-relief, at the Academy; and at the British Institution a brilliant statuette