Works in Public Galleries: Louvre; National Gallery; National Portrait Gallery (a small drawing of himself); V. and A. Museum (Oil and Water-Colours); British Museum; Wallace Collection; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow Art Galleries; National Gallery of Ireland.
Biographical and Critical Sources: “Annual Register” and “Gentleman’s Magazine,” 1828; Cunningham’s “Lives,” etc.; Redgrave’s “Dictionary”; The Studio, Nov. 1904; Catalogue of Bonington’s Lithographs, by Aglaüs Bonvenne (Paris), 1873; “Influence de Bonington et de l’Ecole Anglaise sur la Peinture de Paysage en France,” by A. Dubuisson (Walpole Society’s Vol. II.).
Reproductions: “Series of Subjects from Bonington’s Works,” lithographed by J. D. Harding (twenty-one plates), 1828; Monkhouse’s and Hughes’s works cited above.]
Bonington was the most brilliant of the later school of topographical artists—those who used the full resources of water-colour for the production of pictorial effects. The drawings he produced during his short life—for he died at twenty-six, may be divided into purely topographical subjects, like the Street in Verona (V. and A. Museum); river and coast scenes, like the Rouen (Wallace Collection); and figure subjects, in which historical costume played the chief part, like the Meditation and several other drawings in the Wallace Collection.
His drawings are amazingly dexterous, firm and large in handling, finely composed, and wonderfully rich in tone and colour. His influence on English artists was considerable, particularly on W. J. Müller, T. Shotter Boys, and William Callow.
As he worked mostly in Paris his best paintings and drawings are generally to be found in the French private collections. That is probably why he is better known and more warmly appreciated in France than in England. An authoritative book on Bonington’s life and work is much needed. Just before the war broke out it was rumoured that a work of this kind, the joint production of Monsieur A. Dubuisson and Mr. C. E. Hughes, was about to be published by Mr. John Lane. Such a work will be doubly welcome, for it will help us to realize the amazing quantity of work Bonington managed to produce in his short life, and its wonderful quality; and it should benefit Bonington’s reputation by drawing attention to the large number of drawings and paintings to which, in our public and private collections, his name is wrongly and ignorantly given.
MYLES BIRKET FOSTER
[Born at North Shields, February 4, 1825, of an old Quaker Family; educated at the Quaker Academy at Hitchin, Herts, where he had lessons from Charles Parry, the drawing master; apprenticed to Ebenezer Landells, the wood-engraver, 1841-1846; engaged chiefly on book-illustration till 1858, after that time devoted mostly to painting; Associate “Old” Water-Colour Society, 1860, member, 1862; painted in oils 1869-1877, after which he abandoned it in favour of water-colours; died at Weybridge, March 27, 1899.
Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1859, ’69-’77, ’81; Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1860-’99; Society of British Artists, 1876; Royal Scottish Academy, 1871, ’75.
Works in Public Galleries: National Gallery; V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); Birmingham, Manchester, and Bury Art Galleries.