Born in Exeter, Devon, John White Abbott spent his career in that city as an apothecary, surgeon, and amateur artist.1 He met his teacher, Francis Towne (1739–1816), who had moved to Exeter from London in the 1760s, through his uncle and lawyer John White. Abbott primarily studied the landscape around Devon. He never traveled to continental Europe, and his sketching excursions outside his region were to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, the Lake District, and Scotland in 1791. After inheriting the Devon estate of Fordland from his uncle James White in 1825, he went to Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Monmouthshire in 1827 and Richmond, Surrey, in 1842. He was an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts and appears in the catalogues regularly showing landscapes in oil annually from 1793 to 1805 as well as in 1810 and 1822.2 Though he created oil paintings and made etchings, he is mainly recognized for his watercolors.
His best works date from the 1790s and early 1800s, such as this watercolor, and are close to the wash drawings of his teacher, Francis Towne. Abbott’s work was rediscovered thanks to the publication of Joseph Farington’s Diary in the Morning Post in 1922; subsequently, A. P. Oppé produced a study of the artist, after completing one on his teacher, Towne.3 Abbott emulated Towne’s technique of combining pen lines with flat planes of clear watercolor.
In 1769 the British poet Thomas Gray called the area of the Lake District near Grasmere and Windermere, the largest natural lake in England, “an unsuspected paradise.”4 More artists and writers headed to the Lake District due to their inability to travel easily in continental Europe because of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). At least by the 1790s, the Lake District was considered a form of the English Alps.5 These tourists fed their ardent appetite for the search of the picturesque and the sublime. The eighteenth-century theorist William Gilpin instructed the British to travel domestically and to draw and paint after assessing landscapes for their picturesque qualities. In his Essay on Prints (1768), he defined “that particular kind of beauty of which is agreeable in a picture,” and afterward he juxtaposed words and images in a series of books with aquatinted plates, such as his Tour of the Lakes (published in 1786) after his own tour there in 1770, in which he took inspiration from Lake Windermere for one of his prints.6 Later, the poet William Wordsworth would complain about the increased interest in the Lake District, commenting that “cheap trains poured out hundreds at a time along the margin of Windermere.”7
Among the best features of Great Langdale, a valley in the Lake District in northwest England, is the Langdale Pikes, a group of peaks on the northern side of the dale. Abbott has portrayed the picturesque lakeshore set against those looming mountains. This view of the peaks is taken from near the long and narrow Windermere, a “ribbon” lake that lies in a steep-sided river valley that was deepened by successive glaciations.8 His subtle treatment of the closely interlocking hills and his careful diffusion and differentiation of light and shade are restrained but persuasive. The artist studied the reflections in the pool of water and handled the trees and undergrowth with intricacy. As an added treatment, Abbott used his own artist’s mount with a wash-line border.
When Abbott was on his tours, he concentrated on producing outlines with a pencil of a chosen landscape, often numbering the sketches in succession. The number of drawings he produced on a day of sketching would have limited the addition of color on the spot, and he probably finished them back in his studio. His application of watercolor in thin layers does not suggest that he added them with haste. He produced about seventy to eighty drawings without color during this six-week trip to the Lake District.9 In June and July of 1938, fifty-nine drawings by Abbott, the first large exhibition of his work, were shown at Walker’s Gallery in London, with forty-four of them being from the collection of Sir Mark Grant-Sturgis, KCB. Almost all works from this collection had the initials J. W. A. on the back of the mount, along with the name of the place depicted and the date of execution, as is the case with this drawing.10 Other artists from this period who sketched in this region included Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Hearne, Joseph Wright of Derby, and John Constable.11 Francis Towne toured the Lake District in 1786 in the company of James White and John Merivale. Towne’s long, horizontal sketch of Elterwater in graphite had color notations, indicating that he added color at a later date.12 He also portrayed in watercolor a view looking over Lake Windermere to the Langdale Pikes in the west after the sun had set when he was staying at Low Wood Inn (fig. 23.1).13 Thomas Rowlandson, in his images for Poetical Magazine, featured the satire of the Tour of Doctor Syntax, in which the doctor is seen sketching by the lake and coloring his images in the evening back at an inn.14 —Dena M. Woodall
Notes
1. John White Abbott and others, such as Sir George Beaumont, were considered gentlemen amateur artists who publicly exhibited their works, which were sometimes considered as equal to or surpassing works by professional artists. See Kim Sloan, “A Noble Art”: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum Press, 2000), 212.
2. See A. P. Oppé, “John White Abbott of Exeter (1763–1851),” Walpole Society 13 (1924–25): 68.
3. The portrait painter John Downman, in a letter to the artist and eighteenth-century chronicler of the London art circle Joseph Farington, mentioned his preference for Abbott’s drawings and watercolors over his pen paintings, for “they are done with more spirit.” See Oppé, “John White Abbott of Exeter,” 74.
4. Thomas Gray’s journal of his tour in 1769 was published in 1775. See Peter Bicknell and Robert Woof, The Lake District Discovered 1810–1850: Artists, the Tourists, and Wordsworth, exh. cat. (Grasmere, UK: Wordsworth Museum, the Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1983), 5.
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Gilpin presented his View of Windermere, from Tour to the Lakes, plate 9. See William Gilpin, An Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon Principles of Picturesque Beauty, the Different Kinds of Prints and the Characters of the Most Noted Masters (London: Printed by G. Scott for J. Robson, 1768), 2–3, and Francesca Orestano, “The Revd William Gilpin and the Picturesque; or, Who’s Afraid of Doctor Syntax?” Garden History 131, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 169. See also Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760–1800 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1990).
7. William Wordsworth, Kendal and Windermere Railway: Two Letters Re-Printed from the Morning Post (Kendal, UK: R. Branthwaite and Son, 1845).
8. The village of Windermere does not directly touch the lake but is about a twenty-minute walk away; the only village on the lakeshore is Bowness-on-Windermere.
9. Other works on paper from this trip include two works in the Spooner Collection, the Courtauld, London. See Abbott, Thirlmere and Skiddaw, Lake District, July 12, 1791, watercolor, pen and gray ink over graphite with scraping on two sheets of laid paper on a historic wash mount, the Courtauld, London, Samuel Courtauld Trust, William Wycliffe Spooner, bequest, 1967 [D.1967.WS.2]. Abbott, Barrowdale and Derwentwater, Lake District, July 13, 1791, pen and gray ink and watercolor over graphite on laid paper on a historic wash mount, the Courtauld, London, Samuel Courtauld Trust, William Wycliffe Spooner, bequest, 1967 [D.1967.WS.4]. See Christopher Baker, English Drawings and Watercolours 1600–1900: National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland, 2011), 19, under D5375.
10. See Martin Hardie, Water-Colour Painting in Britain, vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century (London: B. T. Batsford, 1966), 128.
11. See Thomas Gainsborough, The Langdale Pikes, c. 1783, graphite and wash on paper, the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, gift of Charles Warren, 1985; John Constable, The Langdale Pikes, 1806, graphite, the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere.
12. See Francis Towne, Elterwater, 1786, pen and brown ink and watercolor over graphite, the Wordsworth Museum, purchased with the generous assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, 1982, Grasmere.
13. Francis Towne, A View at Low Wood, Looking Across the Head of Lake Windermere, August 16, 1786, graphite, pen, and brown and gray ink, watercolor, and gum arabic on paper in artist’s mount, private collection. Inscribed No. 28 / Taken after the sun was down. / A View at Low Wood looking across the head of the Lake of Windermere / Westmoreland, to the Langdale Pikes / Drawn on the Spot by / Francis Towne / August 16th 1786 / London / Leicester Square / July 7th 1791. See Christie’s London, British Art on Paper, June 5, 2003, lot 47.
14. See Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax Sketching the Lake, c. 1810, watercolor, the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, and William Combe with hand-colored etchings by Thomas Rowlandson, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, a Poem of the Tour of Dr. Syntax to the Lakes, 2nd ed. (London: R. Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1812), Royal Academy of Arts Collection [06/4306].
Langdale Pikes from Windermere
Baker, Christopher. English Drawings and Watercolors 1600–1900. Edinburgh: Trustees of the National Gallery of Scotland, 2011.
Broughton, Michael. The Spooner Collection of British Watercolours at the Courtauld Institute Gallery. London: Courtauld Institute Gallery; San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens, 2005.
Hardie, Martin. Water-Colour Painting in Britain. Vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century. London: B. T. Batsford, 1966.
Oppé, A. P. “John White Abbott.” Walpole Society 13 (1925): 67–84.
Powell, Cecilia, and Stephen Hebron. Savage Grandeur and Noblest Thoughts: Discovering the Lake District, 1750–1820. Grasmere, UK: Wordsworth Trust Museum, 2010.
Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Paintings and Drawings by Francis Towne and John White Abbott in the Collection of Exeter Museums and Art Gallery. Exeter, UK: Royal Albert Memorial Museum, 1971.
Wilcox, Scott. British Watercolors: Drawings of the 18th and 19th Centuries from the Yale Center for British Art. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1985.
Wilcox, Timothy. Francis Towne. London: Tate Gallery; Leeds City Art Gallery, 1997.
ProvenanceThe artist, 1791; possibly Mark Grant-Sturgis, K.C.B. (1884–1949), until 1938; possibly [Walker’s Gallery, London,1938]; private collection, UK; [Andrew Clayton-Payne, London by 2018]; purchased by MFAH, 2018.Comparative Images
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