ber of the ‘Old’ Watercolour Society. She then turned to costume subjects, and her domestic and sentimental scenes and illustrations to the poets were much admired for their graceful treatment and exquisite finish. Many of these were engraved for the ‘Keepsake’ and ‘Forget-me-not’ annuals and Heath's ‘Book of Beauty’ between 1829 and 1839. In 1834 Miss Sharpe married Professor Woldemar Seyffarth of Dresden, and thenceforth resided in that city, continuing to exhibit in Pall Mall until her death at Dresden on 28 Jan. 1843. Her daughter Agnes exhibited drawings occasionally at the Royal Academy and the Suffolk Street gallery between 1850 and 1859.
Charlotte Sharpe (d. 1849), the eldest of the family, painted portraits, beginning to exhibit in 1817. On her early marriage with a Captain Morris, she for a time gave up painting, but domestic troubles compelled her to resume the profession, at which she worked for the support of her family until her death in 1849.
Eliza Sharpe (1796–1874), the second sister, began her career as a miniaturist, and was elected in 1829 of the ‘Old’ Water-colour Society, to the exhibitions of which she contributed at intervals for forty years. Her drawings were of the same class as those of her sister Louisa, but inferior in composition and execution; some of them were engraved for the same publications. She retired from membership of the ‘Old’ Watercolour Society in 1872. Towards the end of her life Eliza Sharpe was employed in making watercolour copies of pictures in the South Kensington Museum, her last work being a set of copies of Raphael's cartoons. She died unmarried on 11 June 1874 at the residence of her nephew, Mr. C. W. Sharpe the engraver, at Burnham, Maidenhead. A humorous drawing by her of herself and two of her sisters is in the print-room of the British Museum.
Mary Anne Sharpe (d. 1867), the youngest of the sisters, exhibited portraits and domestic subjects first at the Royal Academy and afterwards with the Society of British Artists, of which she was elected an honorary member in 1830.
[Roget's Hist. of the Old Watercolour Society; Clayton's English Female Artists, 1876; Art Journal, 1874; Graves's Dict. of Artists, 1760–1893; private information.]
SHARPE, SAMUEL (1799–1881), Egyptologist and translator of the Bible, second son of Sutton Sharpe (1756–1806), brewer, by his second wife, Maria (d. 1806), third daughter of Thomas Rogers, banker, was born in King Street, Golden Square, London, on 8 March 1799, and baptised at St. James's, Piccadilly. His mother, a descendant of Philip Henry [q. v.], was sister of Samuel Rogers [q. v.] the poet. On her death, followed by his father's failure, he found a second mother in his half-sister Catherine. Daniel Sharpe [q. v.] was his younger brother. At midsummer 1807 Samuel became a boarder in the school of Eliezer Cogan [q. v.] at Higham Hill, Walthamstow; at Christmas 1814 he was taken into the banking-house of his uncles Samuel and Henry Rogers, at 29 Clement's Lane, Lombard Street; and remained connected with the firm till 1861, having been made partner in 1824. Punctuality and caution made him a successful man of business. Brought up in the creed of the established church, he came gradually to adopt the unitarian views held by his mother's relatives; in 1821 he joined the congregation of William Johnson Fox [q. v.] at South Place, Finsbury. For many years Sharpe and his brothers taught classes, before office hours, in the Lancasterian school, Harp Alley, Farringdon Street. He was elected a fellow of the Geological Society about 1827, but took a greater interest in mathematical science and archæological research, as his contributions (1828–31) to the ‘Philosophical Magazine’ show.
His interest in Egyptology was excited by the labours of Thomas Young, M.D. (1773–1829) [q. v.] He studied the works of Champollion and all that had been then published by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson [q. v.], learned Coptic, and formed a hieroglyphical vocabulary. Before publishing his first book, ‘The Early History of Egypt’ (1836), he consulted his uncle, Samuel Rogers, who said, ‘Why, surely you can do it if Wilkinson can; his only thought is where to buy his kid gloves.’ The first part (spring of 1837) of his ‘Egyptian Inscriptions,’ chiefly from the British Museum, contained ‘the largest body of hieroglyphical writing that had yet been published,’ and was followed by additional series in 1841 and 1855. His ‘Vocabulary of Hieroglyphics’ was published in the autumn of 1837; in the introduction he thus states his general method of investigation: ‘Granted a sentence in which most of the words are already known, required the meaning of others;’ he allows that the results are often tentative, and admits that the problem cannot always be thus set. In addition to his extreme patience, he had for this kind of verbal divination a natural gift; often amusing his friends by the facility with which in a few
