Winchester College Publication English Watercolours from the Adam Crick Bequest | Page 12

Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding 1787-1857
Coastal Scene with Boat coming Ashore
Pencil and watercolour
17.2 x 25.1 cm
F
ielding’s father was a portrait painter and named his
second son after the great 17th century portraitist
Anthony van Dyck. All of Fielding’s four sons became
painters, but Anthony was by far the most successful.
After learning to draw from nature in the Lake District,
he moved to London in 1809 and was taught by John
Varley, one of the most influential English watercolourists
of the early 19th century.
Fielding was enormously prolific, exhibiting almost
two thousand watercolours during his lifetime. His
work is repetitive in subject matter – he particularly
favoured moorlands and coasts – and often mechanical
in execution, but his technical ability has always
been admired. Fielding was particularly skilful in his
representation of atmospheric effects; the great Victorian
critic John Ruskin wrote that he had ‘produced some
of the most perfect and faultless passages of mist and
raincloud which art has ever seen… his skies will remain
as long as their colours stand, among the most simple,
unadulterated, and complete transcripts of a particular
nature which art can point to.’
Fielding’s style was particularly admired in France and
he was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824,
along with Constable and Bonington.
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