Anon. Ightham Mote, Kent

Landscapes After Leitch McKewan & Cox: 1870s Watercolours

This painting forms part of a collection of watercolours by a single hand, painted after some of the leading British landscape watercolourists of the mid-19th-century period: William Leighton Leitch RI RWS (1804–1883), David Hall McKewan RI (1816–1873) and David Cox Junior (1809–1885).

The paintings represent the democratisation of art that was taking place in the Victorian era: the rising middle class meant that increasingly commissions came not from church, state, or aristocracy but from merchants and manufacturers, and advances in engraving and print technology allowed for the more ready dissemination of images to a wider reading public. This included the printing of drawing manuals, which could cut through boundaries of class and gender, instructing both hand and mind of those of the lower classes and female gender who were hitherto largely excluded from instruction.

William Leighton Leitch was one of the most famous drawing masters of the century, serving as Drawing Master to Queen Victoria for twenty-two years. David Hall McKewan, who was himself a student of David Cox Snr. OWS, in 1869 published 'Lessons on Trees in Water Colours', and he made the drawings for R.P. Leitch's 'Landscape and other Studies in Sepia', published in 1870.