William Holman Hunt, O.M., R.W.S., A.R.S.A.

Mrs Michael Joseph née Gladys Millais Mulock Holman Hunt; thence to Mrs Elisabeth Burt; thence by descent

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, William Holman Hunt, 1969, no. 197 (as Sketch in Cornwall)

Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 2006, 2 volumes, Vol. II, p. 109, no. D202, catalogued & illustrated

The present work was painted in September 1860 when William Holman Hunt visited the West Country as part of a walking holiday with Alfred Tennyson, fellow artists Val Prinsep and Thomas Woolner, and writer and art critic Francis Turner Palgrave, who wrote; 'On Sep. 17 we were at Lizard point, where we found H. Hunt, and Mr. V. Prinsep with him, visiting Kynance Cove, which almost seemed to us like a Turner landscape in actual presence, so rich and so varied is the colouring of the serpentine bastions' (Palgrave's journal, Tennyson Research Centre, Lincoln). It was on that trip that Hunt painted one of his greatest watercolours, Asparagus Island (Christie's, London, 24 November 2004, lot 1).

The coast is depicted at low tide and Dr Judith Bronkhurst praises Hunt's ability to convey the landscape in watercolour, in her catalogue raisonné she writes 'Hunt deftly describes the overcast scene with great economy of means, leaving the paper bare to indicate the foam breaking against the base of the rocks.'