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According to legend, Louis Francia (cat. no. 38) stumbled upon Richard Parkes Bonington sketching on Calais beach. It sounds too suspiciously apt to be true, but the two could not have escaped each other's notice for long. Both had just arrived from England: Francia returning home after almost thirty years in England, Bonington emigrating to France, aged just fifteen. Bonington's father, a minor artist, may have given him early instruction in watercolor painting, but Francia tutored Bonington in the medium before sending him to Paris to study in the studio of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) between 1819 and 1822. By the time he arrived in Paris, there had been a revolution in the French estimation of the British School. When Joseph Farington visited Paris in 1802, he recorded the current French criticism that British art had "nothing but coloring and effect." J. M. W. Turner (cat. nos. 43-49) was irked by this assessment: "They look with cool indifference at all the matchless power of Titian's glowing tones, because precision of detail in their sole idol," he opined. Twenty years later, Théodore Géricault (179I-1824) could urge a fellow French painter to "be steeped in the English school," since "colour and effect are understood and felt only here." Bonington was an acknowledged master of those values of color and effect that became so admired in the 1820s, and he proved to be a vital link between artists on both sides of the Channel.

Although Bonington began using oil at some stage in the early 1820s, he never abandoned watercolor, and his work in the two mediums is stylistically indistinguishable. Beach Scene was probably painted on one of his regular trips to Calais, where he would sketch the local shipping and fishing community. Aside from the faintest of washes over the granular paper and some patches of dilute blue, Bonington left the sky virtually untouched, giving the watercolor his characteristic pearlescent light. The sea itself has been rendered with a few quick horizontal strokes of the brush, while the sand and boats have been treated with broad and wet washes, taking on the texture of the paper beneath. In order to create a patch of light to contrast to the sky, boats, and sand, Bonington has even scraped off the surface of the paper behind the foreground man's head to suggest a white sail being lowered into the small boat. Nevertheless, Bonington's bravura technique was sometimes subjected to censure. Constable (cat. nos. 50-52), who lacked his natural facility, once complained that "there is a moral feeling in Art as well as everything else - it is not right in a young man to assume great dash - great completion [sic] - without study or pains." His implication that Bonington had nothing but superficial gifts did not prevent his work from exerting a major influence, not only on British watercolor but also on Anglo-French painting as a whole. Camille Corot (1796-1875) once confessed that it was upon seeing a small Bonington watercolor like this that he finally resolved to become a painter.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 168, no. 73