Blackcock at the Lek

A watercolour of identical size, of blackgame in flight and entitled Autumn Alarm, is included in John Southern, Thorburn's Landscape, pp. 42-3, illustrated, and was sold for £37,030 in the sale of works by Archibald Thorburn from the Thorburn Museum, 31 March 1993, lot 62. Southern points out that this is a relatively early work, executed in 1900, the year before the present lot, when the artist was only forty. In Southern's words 'the picture clearly shows the painstaking attention of the artist to bird and background at this stage of his career'. The 'tight' execution, with a relatively dry brush, contrasts sharply with the much freer technique employed thirty years later.