William Callow, RWS (1812-1908) [Aw60]
ON THE RIVER SEINE, 1830s
Watercolour (H. 18 cm, W. 24 cm)
Callow is unlikely ever to have met Richard Parkes Bonington (see cat. no. 18) but his influence is evident in the present watercolour which dates from the early 1830s. Callow was apprenticed to the engraver Theodore Fielding from 1823 until July 1829, when he was asked by Thales Fielding, the brother of Theodore, to help him with an engraving project in Paris. Paris became his home until 1841 and he made a good living from painting watercolours and teaching drawing to the French aristocracy. From 1831 to 1834 he shared a studio with the older artist Thomas Shotter Boys. Boys had moved to Paris in the mid 1820s, where he met Bonington and was his closest English friend until the latter’s premature death in 1828.
The fluidity and confidence of the present watercolour is closer to Bonington’s work than to Boys’. Dating from the early 1830s, this on-the-spot sketch was drawn in the environs of Paris, possibly on a sketching trip with Boys. On his return to London, Callow exhibited over one thousand works at the Society of Painters in Watercolours and travelled widely in Britain and on the Continent. However, his best works are considered his watercolours from the 1830s and 1840s.
Exhibited: Sotheby’s, London, Watercolours from Winchester College, 1988, no. 28
Literature: Frank L. Emanuel, William Callow R.W.S. (1812–1908) with some reflections on Victorian and other Modern Art (London, 1926), p. 41
Provenance: the artist’s widow; Walker’s Galleries, London, 1926; gift of Harry Collison, 1940