In Englands green & pleasant Land.

The 13th of March 2020 was practically the last Friday market before the lockdown. At least it was the last day I was able to visit it. And I found one of the artworks I like most in my collection, an original watercolour on paper placed on cardboard by a well-known artist, Will Anderson (fl. 1880-1895), showing a rural scene in a green and pleasant England. On Fridays I used to chat with the owner of this stall at Portobello Road Market. He used to show me his pictures, rescued from storage rooms. In his youth he had lived in Antequera, like so many other English people. That Friday was the last time I saw him. I hope he is well.

The dimensions of this painting are 522 x 168 mm (cardboard 530 x 185 mm, gilt mount 677 x 324 mm). The title and artist's name were handwritten in ink on a gilt mounting: "A Farm Pond near Farnham. By Will Anderson". The same details were inscribed on the reverse in pencil. The watercolour was signed at the bottom left with the characteristic signature of this artist, 'Will Anderson'. Despite its antiquity, the watercolour is in surprisingly excellent condition. There is no doubt that the artist used fine artistic materials, and that the artwork' s owners preserved it well over time.

The subject depicted in this watercolour, a late Victorian antique, is a rural scene captured in a panoramic format, as a digital camera would do today. The scenery shows the traditional English countryside, with its idyllic rural way of life, long before the transformation of the landscape that took place during the last century, when modern agriculture suddenly emerged in the countryside and in the English village. 'In Englands green & pleasant Land', wrote poet William Blake many years earlier. These images of an idealised rural life were created for urban viewers and patrons. The picture shows a country cottage scene with figures and ducks by a pond. Farnham is a town in Surrey, England, 34.5 miles southwest of London.

A Farm Pond near Farnham, by Will Anderson.

Will Anderson was a British painter active in the last quarter of the 19th century. He lived at Barnsbury, in the London Borough of Islington, although many of his depictions are located in Surrey, and some in Kent. He exhibited between 1880 and 1895 at the Royal Academy (RA), at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA), at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour (RI) and at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI), and in many provincial galleries: RHA, Manchester Art Gallery, etc. He is known for his pastoral scenes of English countryside’s cottages. Among his paintings exhibited at RBA exhibitions are his artworks "A Surrey Farmhouse" and " At Shere, Surrey", both dated 1881. 

 

His artwork has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from $130 USD to $3,173 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 1998 the record price for this artist at auction is $3,173 USD for A Kentish farm, sold at Christie's South Kensington in 2003 (Source: MutualArt).

 

This kind of depiction of cottages and farms connects with the aesthetic ideas that influenced British art since the mid-18th century. Among the writers who tried to define and categorise human responses to natural phenomena, Edmund Burke stands out with his exploration of the "sublime" and the "beautiful", and William Gilpin with his theory of the "picturesque". Landscape painting in Britain, and of course watercolour, were affected by these theories. The development of certain subjects since the end of the 18th century shows this influence. One of those thematic groups was precisely the painting of cottages and farms, along with churches, ruins and mountains. Today, such themes may seem very suitable for landscape painting, and for watercolour, but until that time they were considered uninteresting and even unpleasant. William Gilpin himself once wrote to his friend Mary Hartley, "nothing can reconcile me to a cottage", which "offends" and lacks "dignity". The scenes of humble cottages around a parish church, which may today seem almost a cliché in British landscape art, were once considered unseemly, although by the 19th century they had already become basic elements of landscape art. Artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable played an important role in this evolution of the British landscape. Perhaps Gainsborough was the pioneer, popularising with his paintings the rustic English landscape.

In fact, the cottages and farmhouses that appear among the trees, as in our watercolour, the church spires that top the hills, and many other motifs that today may seem typically English, are inspired by Dutch 17th century landscape paintings. The popularity of such depictions in 19th century British art is linked to nostalgia for a way of life that seemed to be fading away.

Some time later I found an interesting and small artwork in a charity shop in Gloucester Road, Fara Kensington. It was an original watercolour and pencil drawing, kept for years in an album, although it had probably been framed for some time in the past. The painting most probably depicted an English rural hamlet with cottages or barns. In the centre of the picture was the figure of an elderly man, possibly a villager or a beggar, walking with the aid of a club. From the state of preservation, I would date the work to the late 19th or early 20th century, although it is difficult to determine. Unlike the earlier watercolour, which depicts the beauty of rural life in the English countryside, this one seems to be a much more realistic depiction, hardly idealised. At the top right-hand edge, in pencil, is the inscription "Lt. Hacthan, Nh. Anglia", supposedly the location of the scene. Also in pencil on the back of the support is written what is probably the name of the painter, "W M CYR?M?AN". It may even be his signature.

Rural Hamlet with cottages and barns and a human figure. 

Original 19th/early 20th Century English School watercolour and pencil.

In our next post we will continue talking about British landscape, and we will show an artwork that will take us to Scottish lands.