'View Above Montreux', watercolour by John William Inchbold, Switzerland, 1880

Watercolour depicting a view above Montreux, Switzerland.

Given by Lady Church, in fulfilment of the wishes of her late husband, Sir Arthur Herbert Church

Historical significance: A friend of Millais, Rossetti, and the other Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, Inchbold should have been their representative in landscape painting. But his difficult personality resulted in him being considered an outsider by his contemporaries. He now appears to us, as he did to the critic John Ruskin, one of the most original landscape painters of the nineteenth century. Himself a poet, he admired the Romantic attitude to nature expressed by Wordsworth, and particularly in his response to mountain scenery. The fourth volume of Ruskin's Modern Painters published in 1856 was subtitled 'Of Mountain Beauty', and, having first painted mountains in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland on a visit the year before, it was inevitable that he should visit Switzerland with Ruskin himself. In 1879 he returned, and settled there for the last years of his life. It must have been the clear light of the Swiss landscape that inspired the luminosity of his technique, which often makes his paintings in oil look like watercolours.

John William Inchbold (1830-1888) was a contemporary of the group of painters known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (active between 1848 and 1853). During the time in his career from which this watercolour dates, he adopted their ideal of meticulous attention to detail. He also followed the advice of the artist and critic John Ruskin to 'go to nature, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing'. It was probably Ruskin who encouraged Inchbold to make a tour of Switzerland and the Alps, where this watercolour is set.

P.18-1915