This charming collection of watercolours are by Rosa E. Neumann, daughter of wealthy and locally influential railway engineer George Neumann (1817–1898), who in 1850 bought the Tracey Estate in Honiton, South Devon. Rosa Neumann's landscape paintings depict views around her Devon home and on Dartmoor, locations along the southern English and Welsh coasts, scenes in the Lake District, and views abroad in Switzerland and Italy. She was a prolific sketcher, her watercolours often small in size and serving to record an engagement with landscape in much the way photographs and postcards would do in decades to come.
Rosa Neumann's locations tell of the increasing accessibility and popularity of certain types of landscape in the 19th century. The developing railways brought an increasing number of visitors to the lakes and mountains of Cumbria and Switzerland, their sublime slopes mythologised by the Romantic poets. For Rosa Neumann there was also a personal connection: the wilderness of the Lakes was not unlike that of rural Devon, and her father's working life had been spent on the Continent, including in Switzerland (her grandfather was from Danzig).
Neumann's paintings, although focused on landscape, nevertheless include elements of human occupation and industry—such as the lead and tin mines of the Lake District and Dartmoor, and the Victorian refreshment hut at Easedale Tarn. The vantage points from which she paints hint at the growing presence in these landscapes of the infrastructure of tourism: coastal roads, funicular railways and grand Victorian hotels—such as Villa Serbelloni, Hotel Schweizerhof or the Hotel Grande Bretagne—lie behind the artist's lens.
