Francis Place (1645-1728) [Aw493]
BY RICHMOND CASTLE, 1719
Pen and brown ink and washes over pencil; inscribed by the artist and dated lower centre: By Richmond Castle 1719 (H. 12 cm, W. 18 cm)
Francis Place was an amateur draughtsman, potter and printmaker, who spent most of his life in York. He was closely involved with the York Virtuosi, an antiquarian and scientific group that included the zoologist Martin Lister and the historian Ralph Thoresby. Having abandoned his early career as a lawyer, Place travelled widely in England and Wales, sketching landscapes and medieval architecture as well as indulging his passion for fishing. On one journey he was briefly imprisoned as a suspected Jesuit spy.
Place discovered a talent for drawing as a young man. He was encouraged by his friend Wenceslaus Hollar, a Bohemian artist who settled in England in the 1630s and became a leading printmaker and draughtsman. Most of Place’s work, like Hollar’s, is topographical. He made panoramic views of towns and cities, and was particularly attracted to architectural ruins and natural curiosities. Place seems to have been the first native British artist whose main preoccupation was landscape, a genre that had previously been dominated by foreign visitors.
This distant prospect of Richmond Castle is an example of the ‘tinted drawing’ technique frequently used for landscapes in the eighteenth century. The scene was first drawn in pencil and then worked over with pen and ink. Light and shadow are indicated by the application of brown washes. The finished study is less detailed, and more atmospheric, than most of Place’s work.
Literature: Richard Tyler, Francis Place 1647–1728 (York, 1971) p. 69, under no. 86; Richard Foster, English Watercolours from the Adam Crick Bequest (Winchester, 2017), pp. 4–5.
Provenance: Sir Bruce Ingram (1877–1963); Sotheby’s, London, 21 October 1964, part lot 105; Alister Mathews, Bournemouth, 1972; private collection until 2006; Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, London, November 2009; bequest of Adam Crick, 2016.