Born in Nottingham, Richard Parkes Bonington moved as a fifteen-year-old, in late 1817 or early 1818, to Calais, France, where his father opened a lace business based on the Nottingham lace-manufacturing industry. There, Bonington received drawing and watercolor lessons from the Frenchman François Louis Thomas Francia, who divided his time between London and Calais and had recently returned from England. Through Francia, Bonington was influenced by the work of Thomas Girtin.¹ Bonington’s family subsequently moved to Paris. He met Eugène Delacroix in the Louvre in 1818 and studied at the atelier of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros in 1819–22.²

At the center of the emerging Romantic movement, Bonington’s work caused a stir. He engaged in plein air sketching in and around Paris and encouraged the watercolor vogue in the 1820s and 1830s among young Paris-based artists such as Delacroix, Ary Scheffer, and Théodore Géricault.³ He traveled the coast of northern France and worked in Paris for the engraver Jean-Frédéric d’Ostervald on the second volume of Baron Isidore Justin Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1825).⁴ Bonington traveled with the French artist Paul Huet, and they painted watercolors of the Château de Rosny, which belonged to the Anglophile Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchess of Berry, and also traveled along the Seine, making numerous watercolor studies.⁵ His work was first exhibited at the Salon of 1822 with views of Lillebonne and Le Havre, and he then received a gold medal, along with John Constable and Copley Fielding, for landscapes at the so-called British Salon of 1824, when British art was considered triumphant.⁶ In 1825 Bonington traveled to London with French artist friends, including Alexandre Colin and Delacroix, and they visited Westminster Hall and Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick’s collection of medieval armor.⁷ Following their return to Paris, Bonington and Delacroix shared a studio in the winter of 1825–26, influencing one another’s work.⁸ Bonington’s life was tragically cut short when he died of consumption at the age of twenty-six. Though he died young, he influenced a generation of French and British artists who visited Paris, including Thomas Shotter Boys and William Callow.

Bonington mastered atmosphere, tone, and color with extraordinary facility, and Delacroix admired his economy of methods and the ease with which Bonington made his watercolors. The Seine and the coastal towns of Normandy attracted many artists, especially in the summer months. Bonington probably visited a property in Mantes owned by Baron Charles Rivet on his way to Rouen along the Seine toward the end of 1820, when he was traveling to Le Havre; Delacroix also stayed there in July 1827.⁹ The scholar Marcia Pointon has considered Girtin’s influence on Bonington’s work, noting “the treatment of the architectural details and the handling of the washes.”¹⁰ Although Bonington started to use oil in the early 1820s, he never abandoned watercolor, working similarly in style in both mediums.¹¹

The richly wooded countryside at Saint-Cloud, surrounding the sixteenth-century Royal Palace, is only six miles from the center of Paris and a popular sketching ground for artists. Patrick Noon suggested a date of circa 1823 for this watercolor because the paper size is similar to that used for his other 1823 excursion watercolors.¹² This sheet showcases Bonington’s command of freely applied washes along with crisply rendered details. He indicates the outlines of trees and shrubbery as well as buildings, perhaps the Pavillon de Breteuil, in the background at right. He looks toward a valley between two hills: one called Brimborion, near Sèvres, and the other south of the Château de Saint-Cloud. The placid Seine river takes center stage in the foreground. Bonington drew the tip of the island of Île Seguin and a smaller form, suggestive of a docked boat or barge. The bare paper and a light wash convey a waft of smoke rising to the sky in the middle ground. Bonington was masterfully attuned to the translucency and opacity of textures and material, and here his “pooled” muted washes are layered one upon the other with delicacy. The technique is similar to that of Francia, who in 1823 was planning a series of lithographs along the Seine, including some views at Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, and would have been in close contact with Bonington, who might have joined him on sketching excursions.¹³ The subject could have also been influenced by Girtin, as his wide-format views near Saint-Cloud were published in Selection of Twenty of the Most Picturesque Views of Paris and Its Environs in 1802.¹⁴ William Callow followed suit with his own view near Saint-Cloud, looking from a different direction (fig. 53.1). —Dena M. Woodall