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Lot Essay
When John Singer Sargent’s The Black Brook (Tate) was shown at the New English Art Club in 1909, pictures of rock pools and rushing streams suddenly became popular. Artists such as Laura Knight and Charles Sims produced essays on the subject in canvases that sometimes implied sadness at the passing of time. Fast flowing streams were a metaphor for the transience of life.
The most important exponent of this sub-genre was however the Scarborough artist, Harry Watson. Trained locally and at Lambeth School of Art and the Royal College of Art, Watson was part of a fascinating, but now neglected generation of students that included Harold Speed, Fred Appleyard, George Spencer Watson, William Russell Flint and the Young Hunters. Although he was already a seasoned exhibitor by the end of the Edwardian era, it was with paintings of babbling brooks that he found his métier. Reflecting on Watson’s work in 1931, John Littlejohns praised his ‘vigour tempered by discipline … but his virtuosity has not made him into a mere recording machine’. More than mere acuity, the precision of these works signified ‘unhesitating conviction’. Such was Watson’s reputation in 1913 that his watercolour, Across the River, (Tate) showing a similar young woman sitting on a broken branch gazing towards a country house, was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the national collection. In the present instance, it is difficult not to be drawn to the delicate steps of Watson’s modern ‘Ophelia’. Scale, in a panel little more than a foot square, does not diminish the artist’s remarkable precocity.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
The most important exponent of this sub-genre was however the Scarborough artist, Harry Watson. Trained locally and at Lambeth School of Art and the Royal College of Art, Watson was part of a fascinating, but now neglected generation of students that included Harold Speed, Fred Appleyard, George Spencer Watson, William Russell Flint and the Young Hunters. Although he was already a seasoned exhibitor by the end of the Edwardian era, it was with paintings of babbling brooks that he found his métier. Reflecting on Watson’s work in 1931, John Littlejohns praised his ‘vigour tempered by discipline … but his virtuosity has not made him into a mere recording machine’. More than mere acuity, the precision of these works signified ‘unhesitating conviction’. Such was Watson’s reputation in 1913 that his watercolour, Across the River, (Tate) showing a similar young woman sitting on a broken branch gazing towards a country house, was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the national collection. In the present instance, it is difficult not to be drawn to the delicate steps of Watson’s modern ‘Ophelia’. Scale, in a panel little more than a foot square, does not diminish the artist’s remarkable precocity.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.