Lot Essay
Carlton Alfred Smith was one of the most technically accomplished Victorian watercolourists, able, as in this example, to record with startling veracity the fall of light across a room. With Charles Edward Wilson, with whom he shared models and a studio in London, he moved to join the artistic community founded by Myles Birket Foster and Helen Allingham in the villages surrounding Witley in Surrey. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the New Watercolour Society.