View of Rouen from St. Catherine’s Hill
1821–22
Medium
Watercolor, pen and brown ink, over graphite
Dimensions
sheet: 5 13/16 x 9 1/16 in. (14.8 x 23 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, David T. Schiff Gift, Harry G. Sperling Fund, and Karen B. Cohen Fund, 1996
Accession Number
1996.277
Tags
Art Historical Context
Richard Parkes Bonington's *View of Rouen from St.’s Hill* (1821–22) captures the sweeping panorama of Rouen, a historic city in Normandy, France, as seen from the elevated vantage of St. Catherine’s. At just 5 13/16 x 9 1/16 inches, this intimate drawing exemplifies Bonington's masterful ability to evoke expansive landscapes in miniature scale. The young British artist, then in his early twenties, was in France during this period, drawing inspiration from the region's atmospheric light and medieval architecture—hallmarks of his Romantic sensibility. Executed in watercolor, pen and brown ink ...
About the Artist
Richard Parkes Bonington · 1802–1828
Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) was a British painter and watercolorist who, despite dying at the age of twenty-five, produced a body of work that had a profound and lasting influence on French and British painting. Born in Arnold, near Nottingham, he moved with his family to Calais and then Paris in 1817, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Antoine-Jean Gros and copied Old Mas...