- Description
-
- Creator
- Francis Towne (1739 - 1816)
- Title(s)
-
- Ullswater from Gowbarrow Park
- Ulswater
- Ulswater, near Patterdale
- Date
- 1786
- Medium
- Pencil, pen and grey and brown inks, watercolour, scratching out
- Dimensions
-
- image width 135mm,
- image length 155mm
- Mount
- mounted by the artist
- Inscription
-
- sheet, recto, lower left
- “No37 F.Towne delt 1786”
- in dark brown ink
- Inscription
-
- verso
- on the mount: "No 37 / On the Lake of Ullswater going down to it / from Gobarrow Park drawn on the / spot by Francis Towne 1786"
- Object Type
- Watercolour
-
- Collection
- Catalogue Number
- FT493
- Description Sources
- Examination; Bridgeman Art Library (image)
Provenance
Bequeathed by the artist in 1816 to James White of Exeter (1744–1825), on whose death it passed to Towne’s residuary legatee John Herman Merivale (1779–1844) and his successors. Merivale’s granddaughter Emily Harriet Buckingham (1853–1923) inherited the drawing in 1915 and bequeathed it to her sister Frances Ann Laura Solly (b.1858). Later it was owned by Agnes Lupton (1874–1950) and Norman Darnton Lupton (1875–1953) of Hyde Crook, Dorchester, Dorset, who bequeathed it to the current owner, Leeds City Art Gallery (13.198/53).
- Associated People & Organisations
- Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, 1953, 13.198/53
- Norman Darnton Lupton (1875 - 1953), Dorchester
- Agnes Lupton (1874 - 1950), Dorchester
- Frances Ann Laura Solly (1858 - alive in 1932), 1923
- Emily Harriet Buckingham (1853 - 1923), 1915
- John Herman Merivale (1779 - 1844), 1825
- James White (1744 - 1825), Exeter, 1816
- Exhibition History
- [?] Exhibition of Original Drawings at the Gallery, No.20 Lower Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, 20 Lower Brook Street, 1805, no. 53, 54 or 55, as 'Ulswater', or 'Ulswater, near Patterdale'
- The Lupton Collection, Leeds City Art Gallery, 1972, no. 73
- The Discovery of the Lake District, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1984, no. 90
- Bibliography
- Adrian Bury, Francis Towne - Lone Star of Water-Colour Painting, Charles Skilton: London, 1962, p. 132
- Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds Art Calendar, No. 26: Leeds, 1954, p. 12
Footnotes
- 1 After Joseph Farington, Ullswater from Gobarrow Park, ca. 1785 (Wordsworth Trust).
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Comment
This is a view looking south-west down Ullswater, a lake in the north east part of the Lake District, near Penrith. Gowbarrow Park is on the northern side of Ullswater near its western end. The brown mountain to the left of this drawing is Place Fell.
Towne added colour to this drawing as or after he mounted it, as some of the colour has strayed onto the mount. It is evidently a drawing from a sketchbook that Towne has cut down in size, losing an area of paper of ca. 100 x 155 mm.
An engraving of Joseph Farington’s view of Ullswater from Gowbarrow Park was published in 1785.1 All the basic landscape features exist in both views but have been deployed quite differently to create quite different effects. Where Towne’s sublime Ullswater is a short body of water edged with crowding rocks, somewhat like a north Italian lake, Farington’s beautiful Ullswater is a lengthy sea of calm—the effect Towne was seeking in FT526.