Notable sales

According to Patrick Noon’s 2008 catalogue raisonné, the present watercolour, made in the year before the artist’s death, is the last surviving pure marine watercolour which Bonington painted. Pure, in so far as it is free from landforms, figures or buildings. Noon describes it as ‘exceptionally well-preserved’ and as a return ‘to the marine subject upon which his reputation was founded’. Furthermore, it is additionally interesting by the fact that it remains one of only a couple marine watercolours which Bonington painted in the last few years of his life. The most wonderful marine watercolours made before the present work and ‘Shipping off Genoa’ (no. 265, c.1828) were all executed in 1824 and 1825 (nos. 98, 99, 112). The majority of these are now in museums.  

The admiration that the present watercolour was held in by Bonington’s contemporaries is attested to by the lithograph made by J.D. Harding in 1830 (plate 21 in his Subjects from the Works of Richard Parkes Bonington) and the two watercolour copies of the work, one in the collections of Eton College and the other at the Yale Center for British Art. The work at Yale was interestingly bought by Paul Mellon at Christie’s in 1976, where it was sold fully attributed to Bonington for £16,000, a world record price for a Bonington watercolour at that time. It has subsequently been downgraded to a copy.  

Two cutters glide through choppy waters, the closest one flies a Dutch ensign, its long bowsprit points towards further shipping in the distance: the high spars of a threemaster in profile - probably an anchored man-of-war or East Indiaman - in front of it appears to be a collier-brig with its bow set to us and a pair of cutters which are on the verge of passing in front of the brig’s hull. A heaving brown buoy rolls with the waves in the near waters.  Using the information from a title once affixed to this watercolour: A Cutter with Shipping in a stiff breeze off Calais - and taking into account the date (1827), the Dutch ensign, the type of shipping depicted, and Bonington’s two visits to London in the spring and winter of 1827, it is almost certainly a seascape on the strait of Dover.  

The brilliant chromaticism of the sea, an interlacing of precise yet varied combinations of pure tints - Prussian blue, blue verditter and verdigris green - all bind into a singular and radiant intensity of colour and effect. His felicity in catching transitory flashes of light, texture and depth in the the dancing waves are as clearly expressed in this watercolour as it ever was elsewhere in his work. The inlaid silvery-white thread of Bonington’s fine-spun scratching out which delicately curves and traces the crests of the waves recalls Wordsworth’s ‘beside a sea that could not cease to smile’. Above all this prevails a high windy sky, subtly configured by ephemeral blots of lilac and translucent fluid washes of pale blue.  

“To my mind, some other modern artists show qualities of strength, or of accuracy in representation, which are superior to Bonington’s, but nobody in this modern school, or possibly even before him, has had this lightness of touch, which, particularly in watercolour, makes his works a type of diamond that flatters and ravishes the eye, quite independently of their subject or of any representational qualities.”

—— Eugène Delacroix, 1861