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Lot Essay
The drawing must be among those mentioned by Crane in his Reminiscences as having been executed during a family holiday in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. 'Our summer holidays this year with our children were spent at Harlech under the towers of the romatically situated Edwardian castle, with the Snowdon range and the mountainous coast of Caernarvonshire for background, and the waste of sand-dunes at our feet. Here I found abundance of attractive material for sketches and studies among the sand solitudes on the shore, or inland as far as the beautiful lake of Cum Bycham. Characteristic Welsh weather in compensation for wetness showing maginificent sky effects, as cloud and sunshine and rain chased one another over the mountainous distance, or melted into the glow of sunset.'
The long narrow landscape format reflects Crane's awareness of the Etruscan School, and particularly his contact with two of its leading lights, Giovanni Costa and Matthew Ridley Corbet, during a visit to Rome in 1883. La Primavera (private collection), a picture he painted during his stay, offers a very close parallel in terms of shape and composition, while the mountain ranges in the backgrounds of both works could hardly be more similar (see The Last Romantics, exh. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1989, p.89, cat. no. 36, illustrated).
The long narrow landscape format reflects Crane's awareness of the Etruscan School, and particularly his contact with two of its leading lights, Giovanni Costa and Matthew Ridley Corbet, during a visit to Rome in 1883. La Primavera (private collection), a picture he painted during his stay, offers a very close parallel in terms of shape and composition, while the mountain ranges in the backgrounds of both works could hardly be more similar (see The Last Romantics, exh. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1989, p.89, cat. no. 36, illustrated).