James Herbert Draper was born in London and educated at the St. John's Wood Art School and at the Royal Academy Schools. He won the Royal Academy Travelling Scholarship in 1889 and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris and in Rome. He had already begun to exhibit his paintings at the Royal Academy, and showed there regularly between 1887 and his death.Draper was a painter of powerful and sensuous imaginative works who enjoyed considerable success around 1900. However, his work has been little studied, because his fluent academic draftsmanship, the result of a training received in Paris, rapidly became unfashionable in the 20th century. His merits are only now being reassessed.