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Lot Essay
Little is known about Boys' early life until he was apprenticed to the engraver George Cooke, whose work included J.M.W. Turner's Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (1814-16). It would have been at Cooke's studio that he learnt to draw detailed architectural studies and mastered the complexities of perspective.
By 1825 Boys was working in Paris where he met and was greatly influenced by, the celebrated watercolourist Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828). Although Boys' scope is not as extensive as that of Bonington's, with fewer figurative or historical subjects, Bonington's influence is clear in the present watercolour and other similar works. The use of scratching out, touches of bodycolour and sweeping washes to add extreme points of light and shade, are characteristic of Bonington's work. However, by drawing on his early career as an engraver, Boys' precise and detailed way of depicting architecture differs from Bonington's more evanescent and picturesque technique.
There are two comparable watercolours of the part of the Tuilleries known as the Pavillon de Flore, executed from the other side of the building, in important public collections. One, executed in 1829 like the present watercolour, is at the Victoria & Albert Museum (AL 5745), and was reproduced in Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen etc. Drawn from Nature on Stone by Thomas Shotter Boys, 1839, London, 1839, pl. 21. The other, is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and was executed after the V&A example on a much larger scale.
By 1825 Boys was working in Paris where he met and was greatly influenced by, the celebrated watercolourist Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828). Although Boys' scope is not as extensive as that of Bonington's, with fewer figurative or historical subjects, Bonington's influence is clear in the present watercolour and other similar works. The use of scratching out, touches of bodycolour and sweeping washes to add extreme points of light and shade, are characteristic of Bonington's work. However, by drawing on his early career as an engraver, Boys' precise and detailed way of depicting architecture differs from Bonington's more evanescent and picturesque technique.
There are two comparable watercolours of the part of the Tuilleries known as the Pavillon de Flore, executed from the other side of the building, in important public collections. One, executed in 1829 like the present watercolour, is at the Victoria & Albert Museum (AL 5745), and was reproduced in Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen etc. Drawn from Nature on Stone by Thomas Shotter Boys, 1839, London, 1839, pl. 21. The other, is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and was executed after the V&A example on a much larger scale.