The third in a series of blogs focussing and exploring key works in the Reading Foundation for Art collection selected by the current Trustees.
A TRUSTEE’S CHOICE: Part Three
‘South east view of Culham Court, Berkshire by Joseph Farrington, 1792.
Selected by RFA Trustee David Dallas
Joseph Farington RA (21 November 1747 – 30 December 1821) was an 18th-century English landscape painter and diarist and the work selected by Trustee David Dallas is 'South east view of Culham Court, Berkshire by Joseph Farrington' signed and dated 1792. An engraving of this picture was made by J.C.Stadler for J and J Boydell`s `A History of the River Thames`, in 1794.
“I have chosen the Farington because it reminds me of my childhood in the Thames Valley and because I admire his painstaking drawing technique. Farington is an anonymous painter in oil. He is, however a beautiful draughtsman and will be remembered forever for his diaries which cover a 28-year period from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th Century and document artistic life in London."
"He must have been familiar with Canaletto’s drawing style, as he emulates it in a most particular way. Canaletto had been in London roughly 40 years earlier for a 6 year period and left a large number of drawings of the Thames. Farington, like Canaletto, has begun his subject in pencil, en plein air, strengthened the outline in pen and ink and then added monochrome washes, in the old fashioned way. This is a tinted drawing not a watercolour."
"The eye is led towards Culham Court, the subject of the drawing, by the diagonal lines of trees, and Farington has produced a most convincing and elegant work of art.”
Evelyn Newby wrote in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that "Farington's real forte lay in the careful, accurate topographical drawings which he prepared for the folios of engravings of British views which found a ready market among tourists confined to Britain by unrest abroad." This was, of course, at a time when Britain was at war with France and foreign travel was, but for a brief period of peace thanks to the Treaty of Amiens, all but impossible. From the 1790s until well into the early 19th Century hostilities with France consigned the British to exploring their own shores and exploring the British Isles became, again, very fashionable. For a public who had seen the birth of the Grand Tour across Europe, the fashion for pastoral scenes depicting the British landscape as though in a Golden Age became commonplace amongst artists and collectors. This provided a ready market for skilled topographical artists such as Farington. Indeed, an engraving was made of ‘South East View of Culham Court’ by J.C.Stadler for J and J Boydell`s `A History of the River Thames`, 1794.
Farington’s place in history is not just to consigned to topographical recordings, his diaries providing and intimate social commentary at the time. The Royal Collection Trust comments on its website that the diaries, cared for in the Royal Collection are:
“an invaluable source for this period, primarily due to his meticulous recording of events ranging from various dinners, the weather, and meetings of the Royal Academy to his own commissions for numerous publications and wider European events. This diary is particularly concerned with the illnesses of Farington's acquaintances, particularly that of Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, who died in March 1820. Farington also comments on the deaths of George III, Queen Charlotte, Princess Frederica, Duchess of York and the continued grieving following the premature death of Princess Charlotte in 1817. Besides these melancholy events, Farington also remarks on the continuing scandals surrounding the marriage of George IV and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick.”
Farington died on a visit to his brother Robert in Lancashire on
30 December 1821, after falling down a flight of stairs in a church.
Culham Court
Culham Court is a Grade II* listed house at Remenham in the county of Berkshire and stands overlooking a bend in the river, just below Henley on Thames and was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1771 on the foundations of an earlier building. Standing on a gentle slope above the river about two miles it commands a 180- degree panorama of the Thames Valley in which barely a building is to be seen, a view that is as pristine now as when Culham was completed in the early 1770s. Culham Court comes not only with a mile and a half of Thames frontage, with the towpath on the opposite bank, but an estate of 650 acres that has almost regained its 18th-century boundaries, thanks to judicious purchases by the (previous) two owners.
In 1893, the house was tenanted by Sir Henry Barber, 1st Baronet and in 1949 the house was bought by the financier Michael Behrens. Their artist son Timothy Behrens grew up there, and would entertain friends including Hugh Casson and Edward Ardizzone, both of whom sketched the property on a number of occasions. Behrens formed part of the tightly knit group of artists and intellectuals who frequented the Colony Room at Wheelers, the Soho drinking club where Freud, Bacon and Auerbach spent much time during the late 1950s and the early 1960s.
To learn more about the collection owned by the Reading Foundation for Art, visit the website www.rffa.org.uk
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