Skip to main content
As the son of Nathan Theodore Fielding, a little-known portraitist and landscape artist, Copley Fielding was one of five siblings—all of whom became painters. Like the rest of his siblings, Fielding learned to paint from his father, and the family’s relocation to the picturesque Lake District in 1804 had a formative influence on them.1 He studied with John Varley after moving to London in 1809, and with his teacher’s assistance, Fielding experienced a speedy election into the Society of Painters in Water Colours (commonly referred to as the Old Water-Colour Society) in 1812. His brothers Thales and Newton were known to have been in Richard Parkes Bonington’s circle, meeting him by 1821 or 1822 in Paris.2 Along with Bonington and John Constable, Fielding received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1824, despite probably never traveling abroad. One French critic noted his “superb colour” and “appreciated what an astonishing effect the translucence of his use of the medium had on a French audience.”3 Fielding had a successful practice as a drawing master; his pupils included William Leighton Leitch and John Ruskin, who was a lifelong admirer.4 Fielding served as president of the Old Water-Colour Society from 1831 until his death in 1855.
 
Fielding worked prolifically and often on a large scale. During the summer, he frequently went on sketching tours around Britain. He visited Scotland by 1810 and showed works from that trip at the Old Water-Colour Society in 1811.5 He returned to Scotland and Wales to paint throughout his life.6 This watercolor of Loch Katrine in the Trossachs region of the Scottish Highlands is from his late years. Scott Wilcox has pointed out that his works then “show no slackening of his artistic powers.”7 For this watercolor, the artist stood on the hill directly north of the small community of Stronachlacher, looking east, with the tallest peak of Ben Venue seen in the distance, but he used his imagination, aggrandizing the mountain and adding sloping hills along the shoreline, particularly on the lake’s left side. At center, a creeping mist in cool, white-blue hues disperses across the loch as a vaporous canopy. Folding hills emerge from behind its filmy expanse. The foreground is dotted with grazing livestock, attendant cattlemen, small shrubs, a cluster of tall trees, and unmanicured grasses. The undulating terrain retains something of the classical pastoralism in golden light popularized by the seventeenth-century artist Claude Lorrain, while adding a more painterly touch to its textural passages. The hazy spatial recession found in Loch Katrine (1852) certainly borrows from the artist’s 1838 watercolor by the same name, but Martin Hardie suggests that the work is “toward more sonorous color and away from the calm sublime” (fig. 44.1).8 Fielding’s late-life watercolor demonstrates his exacting techniques in the medium, creating a sense of timelessness. Loch Katrine confirms, too, that Fielding was not a proponent of the colorism pursued by many of his close contemporaries. He sought a palette of tonal simplicity, painting in gentle hues, one over the other, and allowing nature’s tints to communicate on their own terms. Ruskin in 1833 wrote of his teacher’s ability to “obtain effects of atmosphere by the most delicate washes of transparent colour, reaching subtleties of gradation in misty light which were wholly unthought of before their time.”9Dena M. Woodall

Notes

1. Marcia Pointon, The Bonington Circle: English Watercolor and Anglo-French Landscape, 1790–1855 (Brighton: Hendon Press, 1985), 17.

2. Ibid., 63.

3. Ibid., 83, 91nn121, 122.

4. See David Wooton, Bliss Was It in That Dawn to Be Alive: British Watercolours and Drawings, 1750–1850 (London: Chis Beetles, 2008), 136.

5. See John Lewis Roget, A History of the Old Water-Colour Society (1891; repr., Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1972), 261.

6. Other works that focus on the lochs in Scotland include Copley Fielding, Fishing Boats on Loch Fyne, Scotland, graphite and watercolor with scratching out on paper; see Christie’s, London, July 18, 2012, lot 854; Copley Fielding, Loch Lomond, 1847, gouache and watercolor with scratching out on paper, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester [1917.127].

7. See Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolors (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992), 84, cat. 20. Martin Hardie also commented about his continued skill in his later life: the artist “still making new and effective use of his power.” See Martin Hardie, Water-Colour Painting in Britain, vol. 2, The Romantic Period (London: Bratsford, 1967), 227.

8. See Hardie, Water-Colour Painting in Britain, vol. 2, The Romantic Period, 225.

9. See E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, vol. 33 (London: George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1912), 382–83, lecture VI, and Pointon, The Bonington Circle, 144, 148n18.

44
ArtistBritish, 1787–1855

Loch Katrine

1852
Watercolor with scraping and gum glaze over graphite on wove paper
Sheet: 18 × 23 1/2 in. (45.7 × 59.7 cm)
The Stuart Collection, museum purchase funded by Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer in honor of Julia Oettinger Smith and her family
2019.675
Bibliography

Edwards, Ralph. “Richard Parkes Bonington and His Circle.” Burlington Magazine 71, no. 412 (July 1937): 35–37.

Hardie, Martin. Water-Colour Painting in Britain. Vol. 2, The Romantic Period. London: Batsford, 1967.

Hargraves, Matthew. Great British Watercolors: From the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Kaines-Smith, Solomon Charles. “Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding.” Old Water-Colour Society’s Club 3 (1925–26): 8–30.

Mullaly, Terence. “Copley Fielding.” Sussex County Magazine 26 (1952): 574–78.

Pointon, Marcia. The Bonington Circle: English Watercolor and Anglo-French Landscape, 1790–1855. Brighton, UK: Hendon Press, 1985.

Reynolds, Graham. English Watercolors: An Introduction. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988.

Roget, John Lewis. A History of the Old Water-Colour Society. Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1972. First published 1891.

Ruskin, John. “Modern Painters.” In The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 3. Edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. First published 1843.

Sanders, Lloyd Charles. Celebrities of the Century: Being a Dictionary of Men and Women of the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 1. London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris: Cassell & Company, 1887.

Wilcox, Scott, and Christopher Newall. Victorian Landscape Watercolors. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992.

Wilton, Andrew. British Watercolours, 1750 to 1850. Oxford: Phaidon, 1977.

Wilton, Andrew, and Anne Lyles. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750–1880. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993.

Wootton, David. Bliss Was It in That Dawn to Be Alive: British Watercolours and Drawings, 1750–1850. London: Chis Beetles, 2008.

Provenance[Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London, 19th century]; [Sale, Bonhams, London, Home and Interiors, July 26, 2017, lot 320]; [James Mackinnon Fine Art, London, by 2019]; purchased by MFAH, 2019.

Comparative Images

Fig. 44.1. Copley Fielding, Loch Katrine, 1838, watercolor with gum varnish on paper. © Wallace ...
Fig. 44.1. Copley Fielding, Loch Katrine, 1838, watercolor with gum varnish on paper. © Wallace Collection / Bridgeman Images.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has made every effort to contact all copyright holders for images and objects reproduced in this online catalogue. If proper acknowledgment has not been made, please contact the Museum.