Lot Essay
The Bristol Sketching Club was not a formal institution, but it laid the foundations for the emergence of the Bristol School in around 1820. It appears to have been a gathering of the Bristol friends of the genre painter Edward Bird (1772-1819), such as George Cumberland who wrote of his friend that 'for some years he was the centre of a society assembled to make drawings in the evening before supper, where the greater number of members were amateurs.'