Friday, March 9, 2018

Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828)

Richard Parkes Bonington
Self Portrait
ca. 1825-26
wash drawing
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Self Portrait (working at easel)
ca. 1820-25
watercolor
National Portrait Gallery, London

"Richard Parkes Bonington was a productive and extremely talented watercolourist; born in England, he worked mainly in France and died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-six.  Loved and well-respected by his peers and elders, after his death the accolades began modestly, but . . . 'swelled to extravagance as the century progressed, until the hard-working and unassuming young Anglo-French artist was transformed into a Romantic British hero.'  . . .  In the 1820s the borders between France and England were reopened, and artists, patrons and collectors criss-crossed the Channel creating, exhibiting, viewing and collecting paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints with passion.  Bonington was part of this traffic and exchange, a British-born artist who studied his art in Paris and worked and exhibited with artists on both sides of the Channel.   . . .  Bonington died in September 1828 in London.  Just two weeks later, on the 8th of October, a notice appeared in Le Globe describing him as 'tall and . . . strongly built, and there was nothing in him which could excite suspicions of consumption . . .  His countenance was truly English, no other expression than that of melancholy gave it character.'  The Romantic myth of melancholy was already leaving its mark on the way we now view his portraits, and makes one wonder whether the reputation for his 'well-known expression of frowning melancholy' was a contemporary or posthumous one." 

– from The Intimate Portrait by Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, an exhibition catalogue from the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum (2008)

Richard Parkes Bonington after Jacopo da Empoli
Figures from Uffizi painting, St Ivo, Protector of Widows and Orphans
1826
watercolour
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Quentin Durward and the disguised Louis XI
(Scene from Walter-Scott's novel)

ca. 1825-26
watercolour
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Richard Parkes Bonington
Two draped figures over the Monument of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, Westminster Abbey
1825
watercolour
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Venetian Scene
ca. 1828
watercolor
Wallace Collection, London

Richard Parkes Bonington
Le Retour
(man in armor escorting lady, with two pages)

ca. 1826
wash drawing (print-study for lithograph)
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Man and Woman in Landscape
(Faust and Marguerite, after Goethe)

ca. 1826-27
wash drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Richard Parkes Bonington
Half-length of bearded man in historical dress
before 1828
wash drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Richard Parkes Bonington
Study of man with legs crossed
ca. 1826
drawing
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington after Anthony van Dyck
Costume study
ca. 1827-28
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

Richard Parkes Bonington
Woman introducing man to another woman
(study for Twelfth Night illustration) 

1827
wash drawing
British Museum

Richard Parkes Bonington
Three Parrots
ca. 1820-24
chalk drawing
Tate Gallery

Richard Parkes Bonington
Two Parrots
ca. 1820-24
chalk drawing
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa