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.’
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
