Regency Personalities Series-Edward Dayes

Regency Personalities Series

In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Edward Dayes
1763–1804

Edward Dayes

Edward Dayes studied under William Pether, and began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1786, when he showed a portrait and views of Waltham Cross and Canterbury. In the three following years he exhibited both miniatures and landscapes. He continued to exhibit at the Academy regularly until the year of his death, contributing a total of 64 works. He also was an exhibitor at the Society of Artists.

Dayes drew from nature in various parts of England, including the Lake District and Wales. Much of his topographical work depicted ruins, painted in a palette dominated by blues and greens, which had an influence on the early work of J.M.W. Turner. He laid out detailed rules for the correct method of laying down the colours in landscape in his Instructions for Drawing and Colouring Landscapes, published posthumously.

Many of his drawings were crowded with figures; among these were two views of the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral on the occasion of the thanksgiving for the king’s recovery in 1789, The Trial of Warren Hastings in Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham House, St. James’s Park (1780), later hung in the South Kensington Museum. All these works were engraved. In 1798 Dayes began to show scriptural subjects, such as The Fall of the Angels (1798), John preaching in the Wilderness (1799), the Triumph of Beauty (1800), and Elisha causing Iron to swim (1801).

He was draughtsman to the Duke of York and Albany. Thomas Girtin, was his pupil.

Dayes engraved at least four mezzotints, one after George Morland, another after John Raphael Smith, and two humorous scenes called Rustic Courtship and Polite Courtship. He wrote an Excursion through Derbyshire and Yorkshire, Essays on Painting, Instructions for Drawing and Colouring Landscapes, and Professional Sketches of Modern Artists. He committed suicide at the end of May 1804. After his death his works were collected and edited by E. W. Bradley, and published for the benefit of his widow in 1805.

His wife painted miniatures and exhibited four works at the Royal Academy between 1797 and 1800.

Read Full Post »

Regency Personalities Series-Thomas Girtin

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Thomas Girtin
18 February 1775 – 9 November 1802

Thomas Girtin

Thomas Girtin was born in Southwark, London, the son of a well-to-do brushmaker of Huguenot descent. His father died while Thomas was a child, and his mother then married a Mr Vaughan, a pattern-draughtsman. Girtin learnt drawing as a boy (attending classes with Thomas Malton), and was apprenticed to Edward Dayes (1763–1804), a topographical watercolourist. He is believed to have served out his seven-year term, although there are unconfirmed reports of clashes between master and apprentice, and even that Dayes had Girtin imprisoned as a refractory apprentice. Certainly Dayes did not appreciate his pupil’s talent, and he was to write dismissively of Girtin after his death.

While a youth, Girtin became friends with J. M. W. Turner and the teenagers were employed to colour prints with watercolours. Girtin exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1794. His architectural and topographical sketches and drawings established his reputation, his use of watercolour for landscapes being such as to give him the credit of having created Romantic watercolour painting. He went on several sketching tours, visiting the north of England, North Wales and the West Country. By 1799, he had acquired influential patrons such as Lady Sutherland, and the art collector Sir George Beaumont. He was the dominant member of the Brothers, a sketching society of professional artists and talented amateurs.

Jedburgh Abbey from the River

In 1800, Girtin married Mary Ann Borrett, the 16 year old daughter of a well-to-do City goldsmith, and set up home in St George’s Row, Hyde Park, next door to the painter Paul Sandby. By 1801, he was a welcome houseguest at his patrons’ country houses such as Harewood House and Mulgrave Castle, and able to charge 20 guineas for a painting, but his health was deteriorating. In late 1801 to early 1802, he spent five and a half months in Paris, where he painted watercolours and made a series the pencil sketches which he engraved on his return to London. They were published as Twenty Views in Paris and its Environs after his death. In spring and summer 1802, Girtin produced a panorama of London, the “Eidometropolis”, 18 feet high and 108 feet in circumference which was exhibited with success that year. It was notable for its naturalistic treatment of urban light and atmosphere. That November, Girtin died in his painting room; the cause was variously reported as asthma or “ossification of the heart.”

Guisborough Priory, Yorkshire

Girtin’s early landscapes are akin to 18th-century topographical sketches, but in later years he developed a bolder, more spacious, romantic style, which had a lasting influence on English painting. The scenery of the north encouraged him to create a new watercolour palette of warm browns, slate greys, indigo and purple. He abandoned the practice of undershadowing in grey wash and then adding pastel patches of colour, in favour of broad washes of strong colour, and experimented with the use of pen, brown ink and varnish to add richer tones. Girtin’s early death reportedly caused Turner to remark, “Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved”.

The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum have collections of his work. The British Museum was given significant Girtin watercolours by the collector Chambers Hall.

Read Full Post »