A view near Port Madoc by an exceptional artist.
Even today it is still possible to find an art treasure in a street market or in a charity. Evidence of this are some of the programmes of Fake or Fortune, broadcasted by the BBC. I did not find a Constable or a Turner, but I did find a little gem in one of the Kensington charities. Specifically Oxfam, in Kensington High St. It was November 16, 2019. The artwork found was an original watercolor from the 19th century. That was interesting, because the late 18th and early 19th century is considered a golden age for watercolourists in Britain. Its size was 190 x 130 mm (paper 254 x 177 mm). I confess that, at the time of acquiring it, I was totally unaware of the author's name. Later at home, examining the piece more closely, I noticed that the watercolour was signed 'H B Willis' in two different places, in the lower right corner, and on the cart gate. Accessing the title took me a bit longer. Even though it was written on the reverse, in the past some careless framer had partially covered it with a sticker. I was finally able to remove it and read the title, handwritten in pencil in Gothic calligraphy: “View near Port Madoc by H B Willis aJ/= Ab309”.
I was then pleasantly surprised to learn that it was by a prominent British watercolourist, Henry Brittan Willis (1810-1884). The National Portrait Gallery collection contains two albumen prints of his portrait (NPG Ax131916 and P301(40)), and his prestige as an artist led him to appear in February 2nd, 1884 in the Illustrated London News front page, “The late Mr. H. B. Willis, artist”, with an article in the same issue, “An account of the life of Henry Brittan Willis”.
We find references to Willis in several volumes: In the Artists’ Directory (p. 182) of The Almanack of the Fine Arts for the Year 1851(R. W. Bush, George Rowney and Co, London 1851); in Michael Bryan’s Dictionary of painters and engravers, biographical and critical (Walter Armstrong and Robert Edmund Graves, published by George Bell and Sons, London, 1889, volume II: L-Z, p. 719); in John Lewis Roget's A History of the ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society (Longmans, Green and Co, London and New York 1891, vol. II, chapter II, “Deaths since 1881: H. B. Willis”, pages 418-420); in Gilbert Richard Redgrave's A History of Water-Colour Painting in England(Sir E. J. Poynter, P.R.A., and Professor T. Roger Smith, F.R.I.B.A. London, and E. S. Gorham, New York, 1905, chapter XV, p. 233); and in Martin Hardie's Watercolour Painting in Britain(D. Snelgrove, J. Mayne and B. Taylor, London 1968, vol III: “The Victorian Period”, p. 57). There are some other references to Willis in the journals of the time. In 1862, when he was elected an associate member of the Society of Watercolor Painters, The Era, a contemporary journal, fully supported the decision and praised the artist's talent; his artwork is often quoted in The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, and the Drama (London, some years in the 1870s and 1880s); The Daily Newswas another newspaper that published a review about Willis' work, particularly on his cattle subject, on December 2, 1869.
Although, during his lifetime, Henry Brittan Willis' reputation was eclipsed by that of British artist John Constable, his artworks can now be found in several public collections in the U.K., including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum collection, the Dover Collections, the Shipley Art Gallery, the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, the York Art Gallery, the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, the Royal Watercolour Society and the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, and the artist’s work has been offered at auction multiple times. A quick search on the Internet will give us hundreds of entries that have been auctioned. Finding one of his paintings in a charity is a kind of gift, because much of Willis' artwork was lost in the fire at the London Pantechnicon in 1874.
The watercolour I was lucky enough to find was a picturesque view with two rustic figures (peasants) on a horse cart in a rural landscape called Port Madoc, but to be honest, I was not able to locate Port Madoc on a map until I read an old book by John Lewis Roget, A History of the Old Water-Colour Society, about Henry Brittan Willis and other British watercolorists. Then I knew that Port Madoc was in North Wales.
In the years when Willis was painting his watercolours all over the UK, British artists had been drawing regularly in the open air for a long time. In watercolour the artists had found a medium suitable for their needs, capable of capturing the fleeting effects of light and weather, and which required easily transportable materials. Today, watercolour is most commonly associated with Britain during the period extending roughly from the mid 18th to the mid 19th century, the so-called Golden Age of watercolor.
This medium consists of a pigment dissolved in water and bound by a colloid agent, usually gum arabic. It is applied with a brush onto a supporting surface, typically dampened paper. After the water has evaporated the resulting mark is transparent, allowing light to reflect from the supporting surface, producing a luminous effect. Watercolor is often combined with gouache, an opaque water-based paint. Initially, artists ground their own colours from natural pigments, but later, artists’ colormen sold ready-made boxes. Since 1780, due to an invention by William Reeves, artists were able to purchase small, hard cakes of soluble watercolor, and from the 1830s onwards, artists could acquire moist watercolours in porcelain pans. Further improvement came in 1846, when Winsor & Newton introduced wet watercolours in brass tubes, imitating the oil painting tubes which had been on the market since 1841. The fine hair of the Asiatic marten, or Russian sable, which held a large amount of color and flexed against the surface of the paper when painting, provided the watercolour artists with a pliant, firm and durable material for applying colour. The handles for these ‘sable’ watercolour brushes were made first from quills, and later with metal-ferruled wooden shafts. The production of wove paper at the end of the 18th century laid the foundation for future technical advances in watercolour painting.
In Britain the rise of watercolour painting was closely tied to a growing acceptance, in 18th century, of the 'landscape' genre as an appropriate subject for painting. This taste for landscape was encouraged by two established traditions, the Dutch and the Italianate, the latter characterised by two 17th century French painters who worked in Italy, Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin, whose paintings imagined a distant classical past. In the 18th century the culmination of a young gentleman's education was the 'Grand Tour' of Europe, particularly of Italy, which often encouraged a taste for such landscape art. Gradually, British painters would learn to look at their native landscapes through the eyes a poet and an artist. At first the British looked at the landscape mainly through the eyes of the landowner, the antiquarian or the surveyor, and the art of landscape watercolour emerged within the tradition of topography, as the portrait of a geographical territory.
The painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, by Thomas Gainsborough, is almost a celebration of the union of two adjacent properties, achieved through the couple's marriage. Robert Andrews, the male sitter, owned nearly 3,000 acres, including most of the land visible in the painting. His wife, Frances Mary Carter, owned the property that bordered his estate, which was probably part of her dowry.
Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750), by Thomas Gainsborough. National Gallery London.
The Victorian period (1837-1902) witnessed the development of the landscape genre. Growing industrialization gave rise to polluted and overcrowded cities, with a growing nostalgia for the simplicity of country life. Illustrated magazines and patriotism contributed to the taste for the pictorial depiction of cottages and a happy old England at risk of disappearing. British artists John Constable and J.M.W. Turner take credit for establishing landscape as a suitable theme for painting.
One of the artists who focused on depicting the rural life was Henry Brittan Willis. He specialised in rural landscapes, often with cattle and wagons, as in this watercolour. He gained a considerable reputation as a painter of British landscapes and studies of cattle, painting in an attractive picturesque manner views of rural localities and landscapes all over England, Wales and Scotland, in both oils and watercolour. Although Willis is largely identified with cattle compositions depicted in specific localities, he was not exclusively a cattle painter. As a matter of fact, his later paintings and drawings belonged more to the category of landscape than livestock. Many of his landscapes are effects of sunset or early mornings, harvest scenes, studies of cattle, cart-horses and rustic figures, as in this watercolour. In his artworks he used to record the districts and landscapes in which he drew, as well as the breeds of oxen depicted.
It appears that Willis never left Great Britain. In his A History of the ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society (Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, pages 418-420) John Lewis Roget states that “the greater part of his backgrounds or separate views are either from North Wales, mostly about Port Madoc, but extending southward by Barmouth to Dolgelly and sometimes northward as far as Llandudno; or in the Western Highlands of Scotland from Oban to Ben Nevis. But he sketched in English counties as well; especially in Sussex, from Arundel to Pevensey, and after 1876 at Midhurst. Other home counties furnish a few subjects, and there are some from the west country, mostly North Somerset, or the mouth of the Torridge in North Devon. Many of Willis’s landscapes are effects of sunset or early mornings; and some are harvest scenes”. The harvest on the South Downs is typical in his work. His ‘Highland Cattle,’ painted in 1866, was acquired by HM Queen Victoria. In 1849 he published "Studies of cattle and rustic figures", edited in London by George Rowney and Co.
The first British Watercolour Societies in the 19th century.
One of the great innovations in British artistic life in the 18th-century was the establishment of some exhibition societies. The Society of Artists opened in 1760, and six years later the Royal Academy held its first exhibition. At those early exhibitions watercolours were exhibited as 'stained' or 'tinted' 'drawings'.
The main sources of income for the watercolourists continued to be commissions from topographic engraving publishers and private patrons, as well as teaching drawing and watercolour to wealthy pupils, but the chance to exhibit their artworks near oil paintings was a stimulus for these artists, who began to explore the possibilities of the medium and the themes to be depicted. Without doubt, the exhibitions offered the watercolourists a forum in which to show their own visión of art. However, many watercolourists felt that they were discriminated against by the Royal Academy, and that their artwork was at a disadvantage when exhibited alongside oil paintings, more numerous, larger and more highly coloured. In 1804 a group of watercolourists decided to form their own exhibition society, giving origin to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Many oil painters predicted a short life for the society, but by the 1830s the society was competing with a number of equally successful societies.
The origins of the current Royal Watercolour Society, RWS, can be traced back to the formation of that 1804 society, later the Old Water-Colour Society and then the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. It comprised an elected group of artist members and associates, all of whom made artworks using any water-based medium on a paper support. The RWS laws stated that there could only be a maximum of 75 full members at any one time, which meant that the Society was made up of only the finest practitioners of water-based media. In A History of Water-Colour Painting in England (London, 1905, chapter XV, p.233) Gilbert Richard Redgrave states that Henry Brittan Willis came to London in 1843, and contributed to the Royal Academy and other exhibitions until 1862, when he joined the Old Water-Colour Society, becaming a full member the following year.
Settled in London, since 1844 Willis frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy, the British Institution in Pall Mall and the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, but was mainly a frequent contributor to the exhibitions of the Old Watercolour Society. He also showed his art at the Liverpool Academy of Arts, and between 1851 and 1857 he was a member of the Free Exhibitions Society. One of his paintings was at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Four of his artworks were engraved in the Art Union Annual in 1847 (R. A. Sprigg Library of Arts, London, 1847).
Much of Willis' artwork was lost on February 13, 1874 in the fire at the London Pantechnicon, a large five-story warehouse in Belgravia that burned to the ground. For years, West-End Londoners had stored their valuables there, retrieving them when they returned to the capital for "the season". Built in 1830 mainly of iron and stone, the Pantechnicon advertised itself as "the largest, safest and most fireproof warehouse in the metropolis". Sir Richard Wallace stored part of his collection there, which was partially destroyed in the fire, while Hertford House was being renovated. The other part was then on display at the Bethnal Green Museum. Willis died at his home at 12 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington on the 17th of January, 1884, and he is buried at Hanwell cemetery. His remaining works, including some oil studies and pictures, were sold at Christie’s on the 16th May 1884, after his death.
A similar composition to Willis' appears in a small original watercolour that I found at Portobello Road market some months later, on March 13, 2020, and which, due to its title, ‘Campo Mallorquín’, sets the scene in Spain.
It is also a horse cart with two peasant figures. Its dimensions are 180 x 138 mm (paper 273 x 197 mm).The artwork is signed lower right by an unknown artist, ‘Ronmin’, which prevents us from determining his nationality. It could be just a souvenir acquired by some British traveler, though from the technique it looks like a professional painter's. It is not easy to depict a carriage with such simplicity. The watercolour is undated. The title of the artwork was written back, in pencil.
Some time later, at a flea market in Spain, I found a small painting, this time a contemporary one, depicting a rural scene around an ox-drawn cart with some peasant figures. It was an acrylic on canvas, signed lower left by Myintthain.
Cart with ox and peasants. Light study.
Acrylic on canvas by Myintthain (2004). 45,5 x 35,5 cm.
After discovering that watercolour by Willis, I did not expect to find others by prestigious artists so easily. Luckily, my artistic findings at the Portobello Road flea market and at London's charities did not end here, and it was not too long before I came across the original artwork of other remarkable watercolourists. In the following weeks and months I carried on my detective work, finding artworks of great interest, which will be the subject of the next articles in this blog. I am grateful to Mr James Faure Walker, Honorary Curator of the RWS, for answering my query, and for the bibliographical information provided.
Literature on H. B. Willis:
-John Lewis Roget: A History of the ‘Old Water-Colour’ Society. Now The Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. With biographical notices of its older and of all deceased members. Preceded by an Account of English Water-Colour Art and Artists in the Eighteenth Century. In Two Volumes. Vol. II. London, Longmans, Green and Co. And New York: 15 East 16th Street. 1891. Chapter II (Deaths since 1881). H. B. Willis, pages 418-420:
“Thus the election on the 10th of February, 1862, of Henry Brittan Willis, who had already acquired a name and standing in that department, filled a place which had long been practically vacant in our Company of artists. He had, according to Graves, exhibited pictures or drawings of cattle at other galleries since 1844, 27 to wit at the Royal Academy, 18 at the British Institution, and 14 in Suffolk Street; 59 in all. He had, moreover, published two series of prints, viz.: Studies of Cattle and Rustic Figures, oblong 4to, 1849; and Studies from the Portfolios of Various Artists, folio, 1850.
His father was a landscape and figure painter of local repute at Bristol, where our artist was born in 1810. What training he had in the principles of art, he received at home; and he bettered this instruction by persevering study of nature, having much inborn taste, and an eye for the picturesque. Meeting, however, with small professional success in his native city, he emigrated to the United States (Our Living Painters, by H. Walker); but returning thence, a year after, by reason of ill health, he set up his studio in London in 1843, and by dint of steadfast industry established his position. ‘An unfinished Study’, exhibited in 1865-6, ‘done at Clipstone Street Life School’, shows him to have been a student there; and of a continuance of the same connexion with brother student at the ‘Langham Chambers Sketching Club’, in 1856 there was evidence in a repetition from memory, which he sent to the gallery in 1880, of a drawing made there (It illustrated the given world ‘Deserted’ by a representation of horses left to starve on the heights of Balaclava, the original of which had gone to Sydney). It is said that he owed his introduction to the Society to the discriminating interest of Carl Haag (Illustrated London News, 2 Feb. 1884), whose discernment was justified by Willis’s Speedy exaltation to full Rank. He was elected Member on the 8th of June, 1863. After 1862 he seems to have confined himself to the Gallery in Pall Mall East. There he was a prolific contributor, and never missed an exhibition. His numbered Works amount to 364 in all, 118 in the summer, and 246 in the winter gatherings, during the twenty-two years of his appearance on the walls and screens. Although his drawings were so numerous, they were wrought with much care and minuteness, and were generally sparkling and attractive. He appears to have been short-sighted, wearing spectacles, as represented in a likeness of him in the Illustrated London News.
Brittan Willis was not, after all, exclusively a painter of cattle. His most characteristic works are those in which he would set his groups of kine in landscapes of more or less specific locality. Latterly, indeed, his drawings generally belonged more to the category ‘Landscape’ tan ‘Cattle’, and often entirely to the former. Thus an account of his Works involves a note of the districts in which he sketched not only as affecting the breeds of his oxen, but in respect of the scenery amidst which they fed. Except a sketch at Antwerp and three on the Rhine (Some pencil drawings sold after his death represent scenes from the Moselle and Heidelberg, besides some of Killarney), all in the winter exhibition of 1865-6, and one at Killarney in 1881-2, there was nothing in our gallery from which to infer that Willis was ever out of Great Britain. The greater part of his backgrounds or separate views are either from North Wales, mostly about Port Madoc, but extending southward by Barmouth to Dolgelly and sometimes northward as far as Llandudno; or in the Western Highlands of Scotland from Oban to Ben Nevis. But he sketched in English counties as well; especially in Sussex, from Arundel to Pevensey, and (after 1876) at Midhurst. Other home counties furnish a few subjects, and there are some from the west country, mostly North Somerset, or the mouth of the Torridge in North Devon. Many of Willis’s landscapes are effects of sunset or early mornings; and some are harvest scenes. To the winter exhibitions he sent numerous slight sketches and studies both of cattle and of ‘effects’; and a few of rustic figures. He had the grievous misfortune to lose nearly all his memoranda of this kind in the great fire of 1874 at the Pantechnicon, where they were stored.
Our artist was honoured with a commission from the Queento Paint a drawing of ‘Highland Cattle’, which was exhibited in the Gallery in 1866. The following are the prices quoted by Redford over 300 L. of his water-colour drawing at sales by auction during his life. In 1870 at G. Rennie’s sale, ‘Early Morning-Snowdon Range’ was bought in for 320 L. 5 s.; in 1879, at McIlraith’s, ‘Ben Cruachan and Loch Etive’, sold for 383 L 5 s. His remaining Works, including some oil studies and pictures, were sold at Christie’s on the 16th of May, 1884, after his death; when some of the landscape studies brought 72 guineas, and an oil painting of ‘Horses and Cattle in the Essex Marshes’ 262 L. 10 s.
During the whole period of his connesion with the Society, Willis resided at Kensington; till 1864 at 24 Victoria Road, thenceforward till 1870 at No. 6 and then No. 12, Palace Gardens Terrace. It was at the latter house that he died on the 17th of January, 1884, after a few days’ illness, leaving a widow behind him. He had many Friends, and among other amiable qualities is remembered for the kindness which he showed to Young painters”.
-Gilbert Richard Redgrave: A History of Water-Colour Painting in England. Edited by Sir E. J. Poynter, P.R.A., and Professor T. Roger Smith, F.R.I.B.A. London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge: London, Northumberland Avenue; W. C. Brighton, 129 North Street; New York, E. S. Gorham. 1905, chapter XV, p. 233.
https://archive.org/details/historyofwaterco00redgrich/page/n19/mode/2up
“Henry Brittan Willis, the son of an artist, was born in Bristol about 1814. He first studies under his father, who, finding art unremunerative, advised his son to enter a merchant’s office in New York. Young Willis however had to relinquish his post owing to ill-health, and again took up art. He practised first as a portrait painter in Bristol, but came to London in 1843, and contributed to the Academy and other exhibitions until 1862, when he joined the Old Water-Colour Society, becaming a full member in the following year. His best Works were his drawings of animals, in which branch of art he was highly proficient. He published in 1849 Studies of Cattle and Rustic Figures. Willis died at Kensington, January 17, 1884”.
-Bryan, Michael: Dictionary of painters and engravers, biographical and critical, (ed. by Walter Armstrong and Robert Edmund Graves), Published by George Bell and Sons, London, 1889, volume II: L-Z, p. 719.
“WILLIS, Henry Brittan, painter, was born at Bristol, and was a pupil of his father, a landscape painter of little note, practising in that town. After a visit to America in 1842, the younger Willis settled in London, where he became well known as a painter of English scenary and of cattle, both in oils and wáter-colour. He occasionally contributed to the Royal Academy exhibition, but the greater number of his Works appeared at the shows of the Society of Painters in Water-Colour, of which body he became an Associate in 1862, and Member in 1863. His ‘Group of Higland Cattle in Glen Nevis’, exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, belongs to the Marchioness of Lorne. He died in 1884”.
-Martin Hardie, Watercolour Painting in Britain, ed. by D. Snelgrove, J. Mayne and B. Taylor, London 1968, vol III: The Victorian Period, p. 57.
-Artists’ Directory (p. 182), The Almanack of the Fine Arts for the Year 1851, edited by R. W. Bush, London, George Rowney and Co, 51 Rathbone Place, 1851.
(Willis, H. B., 7 Lidlington Place, Oakley Square, Camden Town).
-The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, and the Drama(London, some years in the 1870s and 1880s).
-“The late Mr. H. B. Willis, artist” (Front page illustration); “An account of the life of Henry Brittan Willis”, Illustrated London News, 2nd February 1884.
- Most recently, Henry Brittan Willis and his artwork have been featured in Peter Raissis' book, Victorian Watercolours(2017, Art Gallery of New South Wales), in which the author presents the artwork of more than 70 artists who represented the glory of British watercolours from the Victorian period.
Henry Brittan WILLIS in Museums and Collections:
Henry Brittan Willis artworks can be found today in several public collections in the U.K., including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Dover Collections, the Shipley Art Gallery, the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, the York Art Gallery, the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, the Royal Watercolour Society and the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery.
Henry Brittan Willis at auctions:
The artist’s work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 300 GBP to 7000 GBP, depending on the size, medium and quality of the artwork.
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