George Frost Suffolk Watermill

An original 18th-century chalk drawing, George Frost, Suffolk Watermill.

A bucolic Suffolk scene showing a watermill nestled amongst trees, with father and child walking in the foreground. George Frost (1754–1821) was an English landscape painter who lived in Ipswich, Suffolk and whose subjects were almost exclusively local. He was a friend of John Constable and was a great admirer of Gainsborough.

Frost was self-taught as an artist and often used black chalk to execute his landscape sketches. His 1821 obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine praised his drawings in particular: 'His productions, and more particularly his Drawings, were admirable, and exhibited abundant proofs of the character and genius of a Master. He studied nature with the closest attention, and in his attempts to delineate her beauties, was eminently successful.'

The watermill subject is strongly evocative of the Suffolk area and the landscape that Gainsborough and, later, Constable loved so well. Frost's own style was influenced by Gainsborough and he possessed a number of paintings and drawings by the older artist. Although it was as a portraitist that Gainsborough made his living, landscape painting—and the local Suffolk countryside of his childhood— was his first love. The considered placement of two figures in the foreground of Frost's drawing owes something to Gainsborough's attitude to figures in the landscape as 'a little business for the eye'. Although Gainsborough's—like Frost's approach was naturalistic, his landscape views were sometimes constructed, and it appears here that Frost poetically adds the figures to complete the pastoral narrative.

George Frost was a friend of John Constable, and it was this later artist who secured the place of the Suffolk landscape and its mills in the British art canon. Frost was nearly thirty years Constable's senior, but the pair got on well and took local sketching trips together in the 1790s and early 1800s. Constable’s early style of pencil sketching was very similar to George Frost's; it is difficult to distinguish between some of their sketches of the Ipswich docks and shipping. It was in the last years of Frost's life, and later, that Constable went on to paint some of his best-known Suffolk mill scenes such as The Hay Wain, 1821.

Provenance: From the Collection of Dr E.M. Brett of Hampstead. Abbott & Holder, 30 Museum Street, WC1A 1LH.

On laid paper.