William Glover Lake Scene, North of England

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting – William Glover, Lake Scene, North of England.

A delightful landscape watercolour by William Glover (1791–1870), who was the second son of the celebrated artist John Glover RBA (1767–1849).

William Glover's works are rare; he is less well known than his elder brother, the artist John Richardson Glover (1789–1868), but he was also a talented landscape painter and his work contributes to the story of the development of landscape painting in Britain and Australia. The University of Melbourne holds an untitled Claudian landscape by William Glover, but as art historian and curator Henry Skerritt writes, 'the locations of William Glover’s paintings remain largely unknown; the large oil painting in the University of Melbourne Art Collection is one of only two works in Australian public collections, the other being a small watercolour in the National Library of Australia'.

William was born in Leicestershire in 1791, less than a year after John’s illegitimate first son John Richardson Glover. Evidently accomplished from a young age, he is recorded as a drawing master in Birmingham from 1808, then in 1827, he purchased eighty acres of land in Van Diemen’s Land, and in 1829 he sailed to Tasmania with his younger brothers Henry and James. In 1831 John Glover Senior, already a successful artist of the picturesque in Britain, emigrated to Australia, where his naturalistic and atmospheric paintings of Australian nature, settler life and Aboriginal culture would secure him a legacy as the 'father of Australian landscape painting'.

John Glover Senior was heavily influenced by the classical tradition, so much so that he was known in England and France as the 'English Claude'. The present painting by William Glover also embodies this Claudian influence; titled on the verso 'Lake Scene, North of England', it appears to be an imagined landscape rather than topographically accurate—its pictorial elements artfully composed and its mountain and castle possessing a grandeur that looks more Continental than British.

Prior to the move to Australia, William exhibited alongside his father in exhibitions at Old Bond Street in 1824 and 1825, where his subjects included generically titled 'Landscape–Morning', Landscape–Evening' and 'Landscape–Storm', as well as specific views at Pomeroy Castle, Devonshire, Milnthorpe in Lancashire, Tintern Abbey and Ullswater—the Lake District being a favourite subject of William like his father. Additionally, there is a picturesque watercolour of Barnard Castle by William Glover in the collection of the V&A (no. P.47-1920).

The present drawing is undated but is most likely to have been executed before his departure to Australia. The Claudian landscape by William Glover in the University of Melbourne collection, however, dates from 1830, painted after his arrival in Australia, but nevertheless embodying the European tradition. It attests to the persistent vision of the Claudian landscape being the ideal and the translation of these values into the canonical version of 19th-century Australian landscape art.

William and his brother Henry eventually took up land at Bagdad, north of Hobart, but their partnership was soon dissolved due to a personal disagreement. William had little luck in farming, and filed for bankruptcy in 1842, before moving to Melbourne where he lived out his days as a coachman, dying in 1870.