- Description
-
- Creator
- Arabella Yeoman
- Title(s)
-
- A View near Exeter
- Date
- 1801
- Medium
- Pen and ink, watercolour
- Dimensions
-
- image height 216mm,
- image width 292mm
- Mount
- on a contemporary mount
- Label
-
- artist's mount
- “1801 / A View near Exeter drawn / by Arabella Yeoman from / a Drawing by F.Towne”
- in Towne’s hand, on a label formerly attached to the mount
- Object Type
- Watercolour
-
- Versions
- View of Exeter
- Catalogue Number
- FT861
- Description Sources
- Examination; Owner (image)
Provenance
In an album “dispersed during the 1980s” according to Wilcox. The example entered the collection of Dudley Snelgrove (dead by 1992), whose estate sold it at Sotheby’s on 19 November 1992, lot 340, to the owner in 2005.
- Associated People & Organisations
- Private Collection, 19 November 1992
- Sotheby's, London, London, 19 November 1992
lot 340 - Dudley Snelgrove ( - 1992)
- Exhibition History
- Francis Towne, Tate Gallery; Leeds City Art Gallery, 24 June 1997 - 4 January 1998, no. 85
- Bibliography
- Huon Lancelot Mallalieu, Understanding Watercolours, Antique Collectors' Club: Woodbridge, 1985, p. 114
Footnotes
- 1 Wilcox 1997, p.159.
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Comment
This is a drawing after a lost work by Towne (FT626). Given the subject of the drawing, it is likely that Yeoman was familiar with Exeter, presumably as a resident. Wilcox noted that Yeoman had received instruction in drawing before Towne, and that “she was already competent as a sketcher in pencil and wash before 1800”.1 We should not envisage Yeoman as moving from one drawing tutor to another, finally reaching Towne. Rather, she was probably schooled in Exeter, where she would have been exposed to the mainstream landscape styles in print and drawing, under Towne’s tuition. A partly disbound sketchbook by Arabella Yeoman was given to the British Museum by Cyril Fry (location 241.a.7); given Wilcox’s comment, probably the view of Exeter was once inserted in it, as the British Museum database states: “One of the drawings from the sketchbook bore the artist’s name, but was sold before the sketchbook came to the BM.” Fry acquired the book “from a member of the Cotman family”.