Richard Parkes Bonington

Jean-Frédéric d’Ostervald;
John Manning, 1961;
Cecil Keith;
sale, London, Sotheby’s, 18 March 1964, lot 21;
The Oppenheimer Collection, 1965;
G.H. Davy;
with Arthur Tooth & Sons, London;
Lady Warter;
by whom bequeathed in 1992 to the father and father-in-law of the present owners

Engraved:

By Newton Fielding

Norwich, Norwich Castle Museum, Watercolours by British Landscape Painters (1820-1870), November - December 1956, no. 1;
Worthing, Sussex, Worthing Art Gallery, English Watercolour Drawings from the Collection of Mrs Cecil Keith, 1963, no. 84

A. Dubuisson and C.E. Hughes, Richard Parkes Bonington his Life and Work, London, 1924, p. 178;
P. Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington, The Complete Paintings, Yale, 2008, p. 130, no.  68

In this peaceful watercolour, which dates to circa 1823-4, Bonington depicts St-Valery-sur-Somme, a picturesque port on the Picardy coast located at the mouth of the River Somme. It is the end of the day and as the sun slips lower in the sky, the scene is bathed in a golden light. To the left, a wooden crane, used for hauling boats out of the water, is almost silhouetted against the horizon, while in the foreground, people take advantage of the low tide and walk on the sandy beach.

In 1823, the art dealer and publisher Jean-Frédéric d’Ostervald asked Bonington to contribute to his Excursions sur les Côtes et dans les Ports de France, a book that aimed to reveal the picturesque ports on the channel coast between the Seine and the Somme. In order to gather material for this project, Bonington carried out a wide-ranging sketching tour of the region and he spent much of 1823 and the first weeks of 1824 preparing watercolours for this publication. This body of work, which includes the present watercolour, is considered highly important and Patrick Noon notes that the group can be compared, for its 'sheer variety of composition and interest in diverse weather effects, with that of J.M.W. Turner’s Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England (published between 1814 and 1816)’.¹ We are grateful to Patrick Noon for his help in cataloguing this work.

1. P. Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington, 'On the Pleasure of Painting',  Yale 1991, p. 98