Charles Alfred Stothard

Charles Alfred Stothard (London, 1786 – Bere Ferrers, Devon, 1821) was an English painter and antiquarian draughtsman, the son of the painter Thomas Stothard. He studied at the Royal Academy from 1807 and soon exhibited a historical picture of the death of Richard II at Pomfret Castle, closely based on the king's effigy on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. He then turned to a project he hoped would pay better, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, whose first part appeared in 1811 and aimed to give history painters accurate details of costume.

In 1815 he was appointed historical draughtsman to the Society of Antiquaries of London, which sent him to Bayeux to make coloured drawings of the tapestry. He made three visits to northern France between 1816 and 1819, and on the first he also located and drew the Plantagenet monuments at Fontevraud. He was elected a fellow of the Society in 1819. He married Anna Eliza Kempe in 1818; she kept many of his drawings and left them to the British Museum. He died in 1821 after falling from a ladder while tracing a window in St Andrew's Church, Bere Ferrers. His unfinished effigies work was completed by his widow and published in 1832, and his engravings of the Bayeux Tapestry are still regarded as among the most faithful reproductions of it.