Anon. Fishing Nets on Beach, Possibly Brittany

An original mid-19th-century watercolour painting Fishing Nets on Beach, Possibly Brittany.

A beautiful marine watercolour. The architectural detail and foreground boats and nets are finely drawn with brown ink. Scratching out denotes the crashing waves and surf, whilst red bodycolour picks out the figures.

The artist is unknown but the painting evokes the work of some of the leading early 19th-century British watercolourists. The careful architectural delineation in ink resembles the work of Thomas Shotter Boys NWS (1803–1874), who is known for his French subjects. The figures dotted along the sea wall resemble the slightly impressionistic figures in some of the works of Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867), as do the tempestuous and sea state. The scene may be on the coast in Brittany or Normandy, where Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) often painted.

With scratching out to the water.