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| Roadside Halt |
Artist:Richard Parkes Bonington (British, Arnold, Nottinghamshire 1802–1828 London)
Date:1826
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:18 1/4 x 14 7/8 in. (46.4 x 37.8 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Gift of Francis Neilson, 1945
Accession Number:45.146.1
Set in Normandy, this canvas of 1826 is painted with a fluidity and lightness akin to watercolor, a medium in which Bonington excelled. Although the artist had been painting with oils for only about four years, works such as this were sufficiently remarkable to impress Eugène Delacroix, who wrote: "I could never weary of admiring his marvelous understanding of effects, and the facility of his execution."
Catalogue Entry
Bonington spent his childhood in Nottingham, but in 1817 his father moved the family to Calais, and the following year to Paris. There Bonington copied Dutch and Flemish works at the Louvre and later met Eugène Delacroix and entered the studio of Antoine-Jean Gros. In 1822 he showed two watercolors from a sketching trip on the Seine at the Paris Salon; two years later one of his paintings was awarded a gold medal. He spent the summer of 1825 in London, and in response to the work of Constable and Turner began to make oil sketches out of doors. Bonington exhibited at the British Institution in 1826, and at the Salon, the British Institution, and the Royal Academy in 1827 and 1828, dying of tuberculosis in 1828, before his twenty-sixth birthday.
The bucolic scenery of Normandy is here reminiscent of the English countryside, and the design and tonal contrasts suggest the influence of Constable. Bonington’s Landscape with a Pond (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) is similar in feeling, and it is possible that both works reflect a renewal of interest on the artist’s part in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. Noon (2008) points out that Bonington used a dual-perspective system favored by Dutch painters as well as by Turner.
The Parisian collector Louis-Joseph-Auguste Coutan seems to have acquired Roadside Halt during Bonington’s lifetime. He also bought one of Constable’s most important large canvases, View on the Stour near Dedham (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California), exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824 and included in his 1830 estate sale. Roadside Halt was relined and somewhat strongly cleaned before it was acquired by the Museum.
[2012; adapted from Baetjer 2009]
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