An exhibition is being staged to rediscover Chadwell Heath's long-lost Victorian artist Henry Gillard Glindoni whose fame faded more than a century ago.

It opens at Valence House Museum, little more than a mile from where he spent the last 30 years of his life living and painting.

His most famous works include John Dee performing an experiment in front of Queen Elizabeth I and one of the 1684 Frost Fair on the frozen Thames painted in 1900.

The exhibition, opening on July 6, aims to bring Glindoni back in the spotlight with items from the museum’s own collection and loans from the Wellcome and other national collections.

Many of his paintings are on loan through a Garfield Weston Foundation programme for local authority museums like Valence House.

“Our aim is to help smaller museums tell compelling stories,” the foundation’s Sophia Weston said. “The exhibition in Dagenham introduces Glindoni’s work to a new audience.”

Glindoni was a prolific artist with commissions for book, magazine and catalogue illustrations and commercial adverts alongside his historic paintings, drawings, prints, sketches and watercolours.

He was imbued with the romantic ideology of the Victorian age, like his surname which he glamourised to sound Italian.

Although born in Lambeth in 1850, he became a child actor, theatre scenery painter, minstrel and choirboy all before the age of 21.

The young Henry was influenced by his grandfather, an artist at Drury Lane Theatre in Covent Garden who took him to the British Museum as a child to sketch objects for theatre scenery.  

He grew up to be a popular artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873 and would go on to show 39 works over the next 32 years and was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.

Glindoni moved to Chadwell Heath in 1885 with his young family to live in a newly-built villa on the corner of Whalebone Lane and Mill Lane. His studio years later became a small corner shop that’s still there today.

He often used his daughter Esther as a model for his paintings. Some of his best works were created in the area before he died in 1913 aged 62.

Rediscovering Dagenham’s forgotten artist runs from July 6 to November 30 at Valence House Museum in Becontree Avenue, Dagenham. Entry is free.