Richard Parkes Bonington (1801-1828) [Aw30]
LANDSCAPE WITH SHEEP GRAZING, c.1824
Watercolour (H. 13.5 cm, W. 16 cm)
Bonington was born in Nottingham but his father moved the family to Calais in 1817 to set up a lace-making business. There he took lessons in watercolour painting from Louis Francia (1772–1839), a French artist who had also worked in England. Bonington’s early style from this period is influenced by Francia and Thomas Girtin. In 1820 he moved to Paris where he lived for the rest of his brief life. The present watercolour dates from circa 1824 and is an early work in the artist’s mature style.
Bonington was astonishingly influential for an artist who died, of tuberculosis, aged only 25. The British artists Thomas Shotter Boys (see cat. no. 20), William Callow (see cat. no. 21), James Holland (see cat. no. 22), and David Roberts all adopted his style, and he demonstrated to his French contemporaries the possibilities of watercolour painting. Bonington shared a studio with the French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) in the mid 1820s. He wrote of the Englishman’s `lightness of touch which, particularly in watercolour, makes his pictures like diamonds that flatter and seduce the eye, quite independently of their subjects’.
The simplicity of the present watercolour belies the complexity of Bonington’s technique, with his use of dry brush and dashes of bodycolour contrasting with the simple washes in the sky. Like the greatest British watercolourists, he is all about light and atmosphere. In the entry for this watercolour in his catalogue raisonné, Patrick Noon comments: `The pristine condition of this sheet offers a rare glimpse of just how ravishing Bonington’s watercolours were when fresh’.
Literature: Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: the Complete Paintings (Yale, 2008), p. 161, no. 118
Provenance: J.P. Pryce of Exeter, 1876; Dr John Percy (1817–1889); Christie’s, London, 15-18 April 1890, probably lot 101; Agnew’s, London; Sir John Charles Robinson (1824–1913); Christie’s, London, unidentified sale in the 1940s; bequest of Colonel Arthur Brooke, 1954