An Old Bowling Green, by John William North R.W.S., A.R.A. (1842-1924). 1865. Watercolour and gouache on paper. 13 x 17 3/4 inches (33.0 x 45.0 cm). Collection of the British Museum, London, museum no. 1994,0723.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Available for non-commercial use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
An Old Bowling Green was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, General Exhibition of Water-colour Drawings, in 1867, no. 264. It is probably the masterpiece of North's early career. It is a typical Idyllist work showing an idealised rural existence that is far from urban squalor and the evils of industrialization. This watercolour is reminiscent of works by his friend Fred Walker. It features the south front of Halsway Manor, also known as Halsway Court, a picturesque fifteenth-century house on the western flank of the Quantock Hills near Crowcombe in Somerset. The manor was originally built as a hunting lodge for Cardinal Beaufort, a half-brother of King Henry IV. North had initially visited there in 1860 on a walking tour of Somerset with his friend Edward Whymper, the son of his employer. North made several longer stays there later from 1863-68, sometimes with his friends George John Pinwell or Frederick Walker. When North lived at Halsway Manor he was a lodger of Mrs. Thorne, the wife of the tenant farmer William Thorne. The house and the surrounding countryside became a major source of inspiration to North's artistic output in the 1860s and frequently appear in North's watercolours and book-illustrations from this time period. It can be seen, for instance, in the background of one of North's best-known wood engravings The Home Pond published in A Round of Days in 1866 (Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision, 203).
In the painting a young woman is seen to the far right talking over the garden wall to a bearded young man who may be her suitor judging from the look of adoration on his face. He carries an apple in his right hand which is likely a present for his beloved. The model for the couple may be Pinwell and his wife Isabella Mercy Stevens who had married in 1865 (Newall, Pre-Raphaelite Vision, 201). A young girl is seated on the grass in the centre foreground facing a ball and set of skittles that gives the watercolour its title. By the mid-19th century the manor was much dilapidated and the ground floor was partly used for stabling, hence the sheep lying at the entrance porch. A pen-and-ink drawing for a book illustration, thought to be a study for this watercolour, is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (accession no. E.4176-1909). The watercolour follows this drawing very closely except that the male figure the young woman is conversing with looks older and he no longer looks like a farm labourer as he is wearing a bowler hat. This drawing is dated "66", lower left, which suggests it can't be a study for the watercolour if this, in fact, dates to 1865.
An Old Bowling Green, 1866. Pen and black ink and brown wash and Chinese white on paper; 45/8 x 611/16 inches (11.7 X 17 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, accession no. E.4176-1909. See the museum's Terms and Conditions. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Newall pointed out the debt this work owes to North's work as an illustrator: "The watercolours that North painted in the 1860s owe much to his experience as a designer of illustrations, retaining a coherent and linear compositional structure, matched with intense colour and careful observation of detail" (201). These observations are borne out in this watercolour where North has captured well the texture, as well as the patina of age, on the stonewalls and the slate tiles of Halsway Manor. He has skilfully reproduced the variations in the intense green of the lawn, the beauty of the roses growing along the garden wall, and the lush apple orchard in the background to the right.
Despite the obvious quality of this work critics largely ignored it when it was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1867, likely because North was little known as an artist this early in his career. The reviewer for The Art Journal, for instance, primarily commented on North's extensive use of bodycolour: "The Old Bowling Green, by J. W. North, possesses high qualities. The colour is specially excellent. It may be observed that opaque is here used in unmitigated manner. Indeed, we know of no gallery where body colour is to be found in so great a quantity as the Dudley" (88). The use of gouache also featured prominently in the group of artists for whom the Dudley Gallery is best known today – the Poetry Without Grammar School.
Bibliography
Esposito, Donato. Frederick Walker and the Idyllists. London: Lund Humphries, 2017, Chapter 4, 93.
"The General Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings. Dudley Gallery." The Art Journal New Series VI (March 1, 1867): 87-88.
Staley, Allen and Christopher Newall. Pre-Raphaelite Vision. Truth to Nature. London: Tate Publishing, 2004, Cat.119, 201.
Created 21 May 2023