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Lot Essay
This view of Cassiobury, in Hertfordshire, is one of four watercolours Turner painted for the 5th Earl of Essex (1757-1839), following a visit to the estate during the summer of 1807 (The sketches made on-the-spot are at the Tate: Turner Bequest XLVII 38-42, 39, 40, 41, 43-57, 44, 45, 50). Turner had previously been employed in the second half of the 1790s by the earl, at that stage known as George Capel-Coningsby, Viscount Malden. His principal home was then Hampton Court, in Herefordshire, which Turner had recorded in a set of at least five views (see Wilton, 1979, op. cit., pp. 319-20, nos. 182-186). But after succeeding his father as Earl of Essex in March 1799, the earl decided to concentrate on improving Cassiobury, eventually resulting in the sale of Hampton Court to Richard Arkwright Junior (1755-1843), son of the celebrated inventor and industrialist.
Accordingly, between 1799 and 1805 the old house at Cassiobury, with its fine interiors crowned by Grinling Gibbons carvings, had been ‘gothicised’ by the fashionable architect James Wyatt (1746-1813). This entailed reconfiguring the house so that visitors arrived through a new entrance on the west side of the building. At the corner of the West and South Fronts an imposing chapel-like dining room was constructed, with tall arched windows supplemented by turreted buttresses and pinnacle towers. The eastern end of the new South Front was disrupted by a projecting tower containing part of the extensive library.
All of this had only recently been completed at the time Turner started to frequent Cassiobury in the mid-1800s. Coincidentally another of Turner’s patrons, Dr Thomas Monro (1759-1833), moved around the same time to his new suburban home nearby at Bushey. Many years later John Britton would celebrate Cassiobury as ‘that hospitable mansion,’ noting that among the statesmen and literati that visited, contemporary artists were especially welcome, including many of those already connected with Dr Monro. The year 1807 marks the beginning of a period of fruitful patronage between Turner and Essex, who acquired the first of three oil paintings by the artist: Walton Bridge (1807, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; B&J 63). The picture can be seen hanging in the Green Drawing Room in a watercolour by William Henry Hunt (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), and that room also featured the two other oils Essex bought from Turner over the next couple of years: Purfleet from the Essex Shore as seen from Long Reach (1808, Private collection; B&J 74); and Trout Fishing in the Dee, Corwen Bridge (1809, Taft Museum, Cincinnati; B&J 92).
By 15 November 1807, Joseph Farington (1747-1821) was able to record in his diary that ‘Turner has lately made drawings of Cashiobury which have an effect which pleases’ the Earl of Essex. Farington learned of this at a dinner attended by Henry Edridge (1768-1821) and William Alexander (1767-1816), who were both also enlisted to depict the great house and its park. As already noted, Turner produced four watercolours. Of these, both the present work and a more distant view of the house with the recently completed Grand Junction Canal in the foreground (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; W189) measure much the same size, and were presumably painted on similar sheets of Whatman paper (see Nichols, 2002, op. cit., p. 300 no. 4). The precise details of the commission, and how much Turner charged, are not known. However, this pair of Cassiobury subjects approach the same kind of scale and grandeur of the watercolour of Pembroke Castle acquired by Edward Lascelles a year earlier for 60 guineas (W280), but may have been valued around 10 guineas less.
Turner’s two other views of Cassiobury were somewhat smaller. One focuses on the neo-Gothic details at the South-West angle of the house, while introducing a lively foreground of hounds alongside untroubled peacocks and seated deer, with horses waiting outside the house’s main entrance (Watford Museum; W190). The last of Turner’s Cassiobury group was an interior scene, showing Wyatt’s Great Cloister, which ran parallel to the South Front around the inner courtyard. This is currently untraced (W192), but it is known to have been in the collections of Benjamin Godfrey Windus, Charles Stokes and Hannah Cooper. In 1913, W.G. Rawlinson recorded that it belonged to a Mr Davidson, but there has been no trace of it since. Turner took trouble to record precisely the furnishings of the Cloister as well as the general setting, even making a separate watercolour study of one of the chairs that is merely outlined in the preliminary pencil sketch (see TB XLVII 43; Tate D02220; and Fogg, Harvard: 1907.1).
In composing the pencil sketch on which the present watercolour is founded, it has been suggested that Turner’s thoughts were shaped by Rubens’s celebrated View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c.1636, National Gallery, London; see Warrell, 2002, op. cit.). With its pendant (in the Wallace Collection), Rubens’s landscape had become the sensational ‘talking point of artistic circles in the capital’ in April 1803, when displayed at a gallery in Oxenden Street, before joining soon afterwards the collection of Sir George Beaumont (L. Davis, Rubens. The Two Great Landscapes, 2020, p. 86). As in the Rubens image, the presence of hunters and their hounds implicitly reflects the proprietorship of the countryside depicted.
All four of Turner’s views were engraved in aquatint by either Robert Havell or John Hill, possibly for a publication overseen by the former. While individual plates were issued in monochrome and colour in December 1816, it was not until 1837 that all four appeared together as part of John Britton’s History and Description with Graphic Illustrations of Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire: The Seat of the Earl of Essex (Prior to this, the view with the Grand Junction Canal was included in Havell’s A Series of Picturesque Views of Noblemen’s & Gentlemen’s Seats, in 1823).
In engraving the present subject Hill made a number of significant revisions to the scene, presumably undertaken, or sanctioned by Turner (Rawlinson mentions a proof with figures ‘added in body colour in foreground’). The cheaper and much larger run of the black and white rendering of the image strips away all the huntsmen and dogs, leaving only the horseman in blue approaching up the slope to the right of centre. Perhaps this represents the Earl of Essex himself (in much the same way Turner later isolated Lord Egremont in one of his well-known depictions of Petworth Park)? In rethinking the impact the image would have in the wider world, the emphasis shifts instead to a couple of workmen, chopping timber, while a third man walks towards them carrying a planed shaft of wood. By contrast, for the more limited coloured edition of the image, a smaller number of hounds was re-introduced with one of their keepers.
The early history of the Cassiobury watercolours, after the death of the 5th Earl of Essex, remains uncertain, and there has been some confusion over which works were owned by John Heugh or members of the Agnew’s family. In addition to what was previously known about the present work’s provenance, it is apparent that, prior to being acquired by Charles Morland Agnew, it was sold to Henry William Ferdinand Bolckow (1806-1878), a German-born industrialist, based in the north-east at Middlesbrough, where he became the town’s Mayor, and in 1868 its first M.P., a role he maintained until his death.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
Accordingly, between 1799 and 1805 the old house at Cassiobury, with its fine interiors crowned by Grinling Gibbons carvings, had been ‘gothicised’ by the fashionable architect James Wyatt (1746-1813). This entailed reconfiguring the house so that visitors arrived through a new entrance on the west side of the building. At the corner of the West and South Fronts an imposing chapel-like dining room was constructed, with tall arched windows supplemented by turreted buttresses and pinnacle towers. The eastern end of the new South Front was disrupted by a projecting tower containing part of the extensive library.
All of this had only recently been completed at the time Turner started to frequent Cassiobury in the mid-1800s. Coincidentally another of Turner’s patrons, Dr Thomas Monro (1759-1833), moved around the same time to his new suburban home nearby at Bushey. Many years later John Britton would celebrate Cassiobury as ‘that hospitable mansion,’ noting that among the statesmen and literati that visited, contemporary artists were especially welcome, including many of those already connected with Dr Monro. The year 1807 marks the beginning of a period of fruitful patronage between Turner and Essex, who acquired the first of three oil paintings by the artist: Walton Bridge (1807, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; B&J 63). The picture can be seen hanging in the Green Drawing Room in a watercolour by William Henry Hunt (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum), and that room also featured the two other oils Essex bought from Turner over the next couple of years: Purfleet from the Essex Shore as seen from Long Reach (1808, Private collection; B&J 74); and Trout Fishing in the Dee, Corwen Bridge (1809, Taft Museum, Cincinnati; B&J 92).
By 15 November 1807, Joseph Farington (1747-1821) was able to record in his diary that ‘Turner has lately made drawings of Cashiobury which have an effect which pleases’ the Earl of Essex. Farington learned of this at a dinner attended by Henry Edridge (1768-1821) and William Alexander (1767-1816), who were both also enlisted to depict the great house and its park. As already noted, Turner produced four watercolours. Of these, both the present work and a more distant view of the house with the recently completed Grand Junction Canal in the foreground (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; W189) measure much the same size, and were presumably painted on similar sheets of Whatman paper (see Nichols, 2002, op. cit., p. 300 no. 4). The precise details of the commission, and how much Turner charged, are not known. However, this pair of Cassiobury subjects approach the same kind of scale and grandeur of the watercolour of Pembroke Castle acquired by Edward Lascelles a year earlier for 60 guineas (W280), but may have been valued around 10 guineas less.
Turner’s two other views of Cassiobury were somewhat smaller. One focuses on the neo-Gothic details at the South-West angle of the house, while introducing a lively foreground of hounds alongside untroubled peacocks and seated deer, with horses waiting outside the house’s main entrance (Watford Museum; W190). The last of Turner’s Cassiobury group was an interior scene, showing Wyatt’s Great Cloister, which ran parallel to the South Front around the inner courtyard. This is currently untraced (W192), but it is known to have been in the collections of Benjamin Godfrey Windus, Charles Stokes and Hannah Cooper. In 1913, W.G. Rawlinson recorded that it belonged to a Mr Davidson, but there has been no trace of it since. Turner took trouble to record precisely the furnishings of the Cloister as well as the general setting, even making a separate watercolour study of one of the chairs that is merely outlined in the preliminary pencil sketch (see TB XLVII 43; Tate D02220; and Fogg, Harvard: 1907.1).
In composing the pencil sketch on which the present watercolour is founded, it has been suggested that Turner’s thoughts were shaped by Rubens’s celebrated View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c.1636, National Gallery, London; see Warrell, 2002, op. cit.). With its pendant (in the Wallace Collection), Rubens’s landscape had become the sensational ‘talking point of artistic circles in the capital’ in April 1803, when displayed at a gallery in Oxenden Street, before joining soon afterwards the collection of Sir George Beaumont (L. Davis, Rubens. The Two Great Landscapes, 2020, p. 86). As in the Rubens image, the presence of hunters and their hounds implicitly reflects the proprietorship of the countryside depicted.
All four of Turner’s views were engraved in aquatint by either Robert Havell or John Hill, possibly for a publication overseen by the former. While individual plates were issued in monochrome and colour in December 1816, it was not until 1837 that all four appeared together as part of John Britton’s History and Description with Graphic Illustrations of Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire: The Seat of the Earl of Essex (Prior to this, the view with the Grand Junction Canal was included in Havell’s A Series of Picturesque Views of Noblemen’s & Gentlemen’s Seats, in 1823).
In engraving the present subject Hill made a number of significant revisions to the scene, presumably undertaken, or sanctioned by Turner (Rawlinson mentions a proof with figures ‘added in body colour in foreground’). The cheaper and much larger run of the black and white rendering of the image strips away all the huntsmen and dogs, leaving only the horseman in blue approaching up the slope to the right of centre. Perhaps this represents the Earl of Essex himself (in much the same way Turner later isolated Lord Egremont in one of his well-known depictions of Petworth Park)? In rethinking the impact the image would have in the wider world, the emphasis shifts instead to a couple of workmen, chopping timber, while a third man walks towards them carrying a planed shaft of wood. By contrast, for the more limited coloured edition of the image, a smaller number of hounds was re-introduced with one of their keepers.
The early history of the Cassiobury watercolours, after the death of the 5th Earl of Essex, remains uncertain, and there has been some confusion over which works were owned by John Heugh or members of the Agnew’s family. In addition to what was previously known about the present work’s provenance, it is apparent that, prior to being acquired by Charles Morland Agnew, it was sold to Henry William Ferdinand Bolckow (1806-1878), a German-born industrialist, based in the north-east at Middlesbrough, where he became the town’s Mayor, and in 1868 its first M.P., a role he maintained until his death.
We are grateful to Ian Warrell for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.