Richard Parkes Bonington 1801-1828

With the Fine Art Society, London, 1946

The Hon.Sir Steven Runciman, C.H., S.B.A., F.S.A., his sale at Christie's, 7th June 2001, lot 160, bt.by the present owner

This is one of the earliest known views of Dunkerque by Bonington and is dated by Patrick Noon to 1822-23. It shows the busy harbour at Dunkerque which was one of the most used ports on the English Channel in the 1820s. The Bonington family moved from Nottingham to Calais in 1817 to set up a lace-making business and Dunkerque was twenty miles up the coast. Bonington received his first professional instruction in watercolour painting from Louis Francia (1789-1817) in Calais and through Francia, he made contact with Benjamin Morel (1781-1860), the Mayor of Dunkerque and an art collector. He became a frequent visitor to Dunkerque, an escape and spent six months there in early 1824 with his fellow artist Alexandre Colin.

The present work relates closely to one of Bonington's earliest lithographs and is listed in A. Curtis's L'Oeuvre gravé et lithographiée de R.P. Bonington as no.1. The viewpoint is the same but the arrangement of the boats in the foreground differs (see Carlos Peacock, Richard Parkes Bonington, 1979, pl.99, ill.). His lithographs were first published in 1824, the year of his successful debut at the Salon in Paris, under the title Restes et Fragments d'Architecture du Moyen Age, and he produced sixty or so lithographs in the next three years. His friend Delacroix wrote of Bonington's lithographs: `My drawing is very far from having the delicacy of touch that he brought to his lithographs, and indeed every product of his admirable talent.' (Peacock, op. cit.).