Teme Valley & River Severn

We have enjoyed cataloguing this unsual group of gouaches recently. Visually arresting and meticulously executed, they depict views in the Teme Valley and on the River Severn near Worcester—a rural landscape of hop plantations and riverside meadows, popular with day trippers by pleasure steamer from Worcester, who would come to enjoy activities such as boating and bathing. The pictures reference the ancient watermen's inns, the numerous ferries and the bathing barges that operated on these waterways in the 19th century.

The artist is possibly James Watson Bradley (1790–1865) of J. Bradley & Co in Pall Mall, decorators and purveyors of high quality porcelain. The Bradley name was long associated with the china industry in the Worcester area. James set up as a china manufacturer, with his brothers John and Andrew, in Pall Mall around 1812, supplying porcelain to royalty and reportedly teaching the art of china decorating to the aristocracy. The produced a dessert service for the Biddulph family of Ledbury Park, Herefordshire, which was decorated with local views of Worcestershire and Herefordshire in a decorative style evocative of the paintings in our collection. The family maintained close ties with Worcestershire, retaining property in Great Malvern.