James Penson Devon River Landscape

Devonshire Landscapes: 19th-century Modbury & Plymouth

This picture forms part of an interesting collection of 19th-century works associated with Modbury in South Devon and the leading exponents of what could be considered a Devonshire Landscape School. The collection includes watercolours by Philip Mitchell RI, Henry Andrews Luscombe, Samuel Cook, William Henry Pike RBA, S.G. Williams Roscoe and John Penson. Collectively the work of these artists focussed on local landscapes such as Dartmoor and the River Exe, and coastal and maritime subjects at Plymouth, the Plymouth Sound and Tamar estuary.

In 1883 the art & science writer and lecturer George Pycroft published a book titled 'Art in Devonshire', in which he observed that the county of Devon was second only to Middlesex (London) in producing artists of historical note. He writes: 'we find that our county really heads the list as an art-producing land. Of all English provincial cities, Plymouth with its neighbourhood stands first, as the parent of six painters of the highest order… viz., Sir Joshua Reynolds, Prout, Eastlake, Haydon, Northcote, and Solomon Hart, and also of Rogers and Johns, the landscape painters.' He goes on to celebrate the 19th-century Devonshire landscape painters whose work is a 'true transcript from nature' and a welcome departure from the fashionable Claudian artifice of the preceding century. He attributes this truth in landscape to 'that loveliness of the earth, the air, and the water, with which Devonshire is endowed before all the counties of our land'. Whilst Pycroft's assessment betrays his bias, it nevertheless highlights the quality of landscape painting in Devon in the 19th-century and its role in the changing nature of British landscape art.

Provenance: Mary-Rose Rogers (1928–2012) by descent from her father William Langworthy Andrews Rogers (1889–1976) of Old Traine, Modbury.