Breath of fresh air

Laura Gascoigne celebrates the neglected genius of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–28), an English painter of French seascapes who fell between two schools

- Laura Gascoigne

IN the autumn of 1817, the French painter Louis Francia recently returned to his native Calais from London where he had been honing his skills in the English art of watercolour, spied a tall, thin teenager sketching on the quay. Peeking over the lad’s shoulder, he was immediately struck by the quality of his watercolour sketches—and not surprised to discover that he was English.

The lad’s name was Richard Parkes Bonington and his parents had just moved to Calais to set up a tulle-manufacturing company, joining an exodus of Nottingham lacemakers put out of business by mechanisation. Richard Bonington Snr was not a lacemaker by trade; he had previously thrown up a sinecure as Nottingham’s gaoler to pursue a precarious career as an artist and drawing master, before selling up to try his luck at tulle- and lacemaking across the Channel.

For his 15-year-old son, who had inherited his father’s passion for art, the move from land-locked Nottingham to the Calais coast, with its exhilarating expanse of sea and sky, was a formative experience: in a few short years, he would become one of the greatest, if least celebrated, painters of seascapes in European art.

‘Who is R. P. Bonington?’ an English critic demanded only eight years later on coming across his paintings at the British Institution. ‘We never saw his name in any catalogue before and yet here are pictures that would grace the foremost name in landscape art.’