drawing
- Museum number
- 1980,1011.1
- Description
-
Cottage at St Lawrence, Isle of Wight; figures sitting by pond to left, cottage raised slightly on slope to right, covered in climbing plants. 1814
Watercolour touched with white over graphite
- Production date
- 1814
- Dimensions
-
Height: 326 millimetres
-
Width: 466 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Provenance directly from the artist.
Stainton 1985
Cristall was one of the original members of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, founded in 1804; he was unusual, however, in being essentially a figure-painter.
It was probably at the suggestion of one of his patrons, James Vine, who lived at Niton on the Isle of Wight, that Cristall visited the island in 1812. This watercolour (which is in particularly good condition, having been kept in an album), exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1815, makes an interesting link between the eighteenth-century rustic genre scenes, of Francis Wheatley and George Morland and their Victorian counterparts such as Birket Foster and Helen Allingham. Ackermann's 'Repository of the Fine Arts', in a note on a similar work by Cristall remarked: "Such as we wish to meet in every village are here represented by the elegant mind of this artist. . . the group of figures, nay, the whole picture, raises in the mind of the spectator none but images of pleasure". This idealised view of the supposed charms of rural life was characteristic of many writers and painters of the period.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1985, BM, British Landscape Watercolours 1600-1860, no.69
1991 Jan-Mar, Ohio, Cleveland MA, BM English Watercolours, no. 36
1991 Mar-June, N Carolina MA, BM English Watercolours, no. 36
1992 Jun-Nov, Essen, Villa Hugel, 'London 1800-38', no. 241
- Acquisition date
- 1980
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1980,1011.1
