Oil on paper on canvas, 'Cottage near Sandpits, Bromley, Kent', Samuel William Reynolds, ca. 1795-1835

Oil on paper laid on panel depicting a cottage near sandpits, Bromley, Kent.

Purchased, 17th June 1874 for £15 and 15 shillings from a Miss Marion Walker. No other paintings were purchased from Miss. M. Walker at this date.

Historical significance: Samuel William Reynolds (1773-1835) English Painter and Engraver. Reynolds is thought to have been trained by Charles Howard Hodges and John Raphael Smith. He published his first engravings in 1794. By 1800 Reynolds was in serious debt and turned to Samuel Whitebread MP (1764-1815) for help. Under Whitebread’s patronage and protection Reynolds expanded his activities to include architecture, landscape gardening and painting. He began exhibiting landscape paintings, which were admired by the likes of Benjamin West (1738-1820), at the Royal Academy, founded 1768, and British Institution, founded in 1808. His paintings incorporate a strong contrast of light and dark, reflecting his working as a mezzotint engraver. His landscapes are close in style to those of the painter and sculptor George Garrard (1760-1826), his colleague at Whitbread’s country house of Southill, Bedfordshire. From 1809 Reynolds made a number of trips to Paris. There he exhibited engravings in 1810 and 1812 as well as working as a landscape painter. Between 1820 and 1826 Reynolds collaborated with his apprentice Samuel Cousins (1801-1887) on a series of 357 mezzotints after the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1732-1792).

This rural landscape shows two cottages behind a group of sandpits. The scene is framed on the left by a group of trees while the path across and up the sandpits leads our eye in to the middle ground of the painting. To the right of the cottages are two cloaked female figures. The painting combines contrasts of shade, created by the trees in the left and houses in the right of the composition, with light tones of the centrally placed sandpits. Using this combination of light and shadow to structure a composition is typical of Reynolds’ paintings.

Although this painting is not documented as being exhibited at the Royal Academy or British Institute this landscape is typical of those that the artist was exhibiting. The genre of rural landscape was enjoying at the turn of the nineteenth century. This painting along with others of the same theme exhibited by Reynolds reflects the artist’s response to a growing interest in such subjects.

405-1874