Normandy Landscape near Lillebonne

Artist Richard Parkes Bonington (English | British, 1802-1828)

Place of OriginLillebonne, France

Date1823

DimensionsH: 11 3/4 in. (29.8 cm); W: 18 1/2 in. (47 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

1983.8

Not on View

Label TextEvoking a scene of pastoral serenity, Richard Parkes Bonington depicted a picturesque view in the north of France, complete with cattle, peasants, trees, cottages, and a church steeple. The gently rolling hills of the background fade into a vast, limitless sky and a misty hint of the English Channel. Although Bonington suffered an untimely death from tuberculosis at just 25 years old, his impact was felt strongly on British art, along with that of his fellow English landscape artists John Constable and J.M.W Turner, whose work you can see in the Museum’s collection. Painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) said of him, “To my mind, one can find in other modern artists qualities of strength and of precision in rendering that are superior to those in Bonington's pictures, but no one in this modern school, and perhaps even before, has possessed that lightness of touch which, especially in watercolors, makes his works a type of diamond which flatters and ravishes the eye, independently of any subject and any imitation.”Published References

Noon, Patrick J., "Richard Parkes Bonington, Fish market, Boulogne," in In Honor of Paul Mellon: Collector and Benefactor, Washington, 1986, p. 243, fig. 2.

Cormack, Malcolm, Bonington, Oxford, 1989, p. 41, pl. 26.

Lyles, Anne, "Bonington, by Malcolm Cormack" [review] Burlington, vol. 132, no. 1052, Nov. 1990, p. 797.

Noon, Patrick, Richard Parkes Bonington 'On the Pleasures of Painting,' New Haven, 1991, p. 29, n. 51.

Impressions of Normandy: Paintings from France, Nashville, Tennessee State Museum, 1998, p. 8, repr. (col.).

Exhibition History

Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape Painting, 2008, no. 10, p. 32, 64, repr. p. 65 (col.).