James Flewitt Mullock was born in Newport in 1818. His father Richard Mullock (1784-1865) had moved to Newport from Cheshire in 1808. Proprietor of the Llantarnam Potteries and a china and glass dealer, Richard Mullock was long-serving Alderman and Mayor of the town in 1842, and held many other public offices. Nothing is known of his eldest son's artistic training but he exhibited a (lost) painting A Prize Ox of Tredegar at an exhibition in the Newport Mechanics Institute in 1841. Research by Newport Museum and Art Gallery in the 1980s identified some fifty works (catalogued in Wilson, 1993) by or attributed to James Mullock. These comprise animal and sporting paintings (all c 1840-50), portraits (mostly of the 1850s), and some topographical and genre works. In 1854, he was appointed Clerk to the newly-formed Newport and St Woolos Burial Board, and he married in 1857. Thereafter his output as an artist declined, although he is listed in directories as the town's sole teacher of art from 1868 to 1877. He was active in the town's cultural life in the 1880s, and a number of works of this later period also survive. Coming from a comfortable middle class background, Mullock was not an artisan painter, but he never appears to have exhibited outside his native town. He was clearly familiar with contemporary sporting art and his work can be compared with that of John Fernely (1782-1860), Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767-1849), James Ward (1769-1859), John Frederick Herring (1795-1864) and Richard Ansdell (1815-1885).