Near Line Park, Kent. Benjamin Williams Leader (1831-1923). Oil on canvas. 1873. H 40.5 x W 61 cm. Wednesbury Museum & Art Gallery, accession number, 1891.22, P.19, bequeathed by Mary Richards, 1891. Phot credit: Sandwell Museums Collection. Available via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Click on image to enlarge it.
Although Leader was born in Worcester, he often painted in and around Surrey, where he was eventually to settle, and the Great Lines Heritage Park, as we know it now, is in the adjoining county of Kent. This is one of his typical, gentle, rural scenes, with a village with its church in the distance, sheep grazing near a pond beside the path towards the houses, and a few people dotted around. "[A]s a rule he liked the soft, sleepy, amber-coloured sunlight of the gentle summer weather" (Lusk 20). But judging by the bracken, this scene was painted in early autumn. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Lusk, Lewis. "B. W. Leader, RA." The Art Journal (attached monograph). Internet Archive. Vol. 63 (1901). Contributed by the Getty Research Institute. Web. 1 September 2020.
Created 1 September 2020