Richmond Park

Throughout his life, John Martin painted watercolour landscapes of areas of natural beauty around London, alongside the apocalyptic scenes of historical and biblical disasters for which he is best known. Richmond Park was a particular favourite and he returned to the subject a number of times, particularly in the long, narrow format of the present drawing. This is one of the earlier examples of this subject: another view dated 1843 is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and one dated a day after the present watercolour was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 15 March 1990, lot 107. William Feaver notes that Martin made an increasing number of landscape studies from the 1840s onwards (William Feaver, 'The Art of John Martin', 1975, p. 154). He observed that these watercolours '...softened into haze around the margins so as to lie at ease on the paper,...invite the onlooker to become absorbed, by almost imperceptible degrees, into the central and fully formulated area of each composition'.