Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding POWS The Medway from Rochester Bridge

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting, Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding POWS, The Medway from Rochester Bridge.

A luminous sunset view downriver at Rochester by the celebrated watercolourist Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding POWS (1787–1855).

The immensely tranquil scene, viewed from what would have at that time been the medieval bridge, is sparsely populated with just a couple of buildings and a few retiring fisherfolk. Looking away from the town, it paints an idealised picture of pre-industrialisation; the Napoleonic period saw a heyday for Medway basin's towns, when the nearby dockyard at Chatham was furiously producing ships-of-the-line for Great Britain's Continental Blockade, but Fielding's vision focuses on landscape and sky.

It is the evocative rural idyll of Charles Dickens, who grew up at Chatham and frequently featured the surrounding Kent landscape in his writing. Looking west from Rochester Bridge he wrote: 'On either side, the banks of the Medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill, or a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting a rich and varied landscape, rendered more beautiful by the changing shadows which passed swiftly across it, as thin and half-formed clouds skimmed away in the light of the morning sun.' (The Pickwick Papers)

In watercolour heightened with bodycolour.