John Laporte

KT311 b

Signed and inscribed on original mount: La Porte./Keswick Lake-/Pocklington Island./Crosthwaite Church./Skiddaw, watercolour over pencil

22.7 x 37.7 cm; 9 x 14 7/8 inches

Provenance: Christie’s, London, 17 November 1970, lot 10;The Pemberton collection bought from the above sale, until 2019

Laporte was a drawing master who exhibited work at the Royal Academy and British Institution from 1779. Dr Thomas Monro was one of his pupils. He published several manuals on landscape watercolour painting, the most famous of which 'The Progress of a Water-Coloured Drawing', c. 1802, went into several editions. It showed fourteen stages in the outline and colouring of a watercolour. He visited the Lakes in the 1790s and there are a number of drawings by him in the collection of The Wordsworth Trust, of which several are of Derwentwater. His work can also be found in the collections of the Tate, the British Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery.