MDNY 2021

In January 2021 we exhibited in New York for the first time participating in Master Drawings New York.

Landscape painting has long held a marked appeal for the English and this selection of twenty-five works on paper from the 18th and 19th centuries for Master Drawings New York 2021 examines the world of the imagination of British artists influenced by the picturesque movement and the progression into the romanticism of the 19th century.

Thomas Gainsborough famously wrote in a letter to a friend that ‘I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease’. A highlight is a black chalk drawing of a wooded landscape with track and pool dating for the mid 1780s. The exhibition also includes two rich and fluently painted oil sketches by his nephew and studio assistant Gainsborough Dupont, his nephew and studio assistant who shared his love of landscape.

The Lake District was one of the first areas in Britain to attract picturesque tourists and the exhibition has four works by Francis Nicholson, John Laporte and the Ruskin pupil Maggie Sumner, whose newly discovered sketchbook comes straight from her family and reveals the prodigious talent highly praised by her master. This group charts the progression from the picturesque movement to the Pre-Raphaelite landscape.

British artists travelled further afield in 19th century search of new subjects and filtered their new experiences through the prism of their artistic imagination. Highlights include three drawings by Edward Lear of Italy, a delicate David Roberts of Jerusalem lithographed by Louis Haghe for The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Egypt and Nubia, London 1842 and two William Callows of Venice and Padua. The influence of Italy was crucial to so many artists of this period.

The exhibition includes representative works by celebrated practitioners of the British watercolour tradition also including Paul Sandby, John White Abbott, Thomas Rowlandson, David Cox and Samuel Jackson, ‘The Father of the Bristol School’.

Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1788)
Wooded landscape with track and pool