Lot 124
  • 124

George Price Boyce

Estimate
6,000 - 8,000 GBP
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Description

  • George Price Boyce
  • Abinger Mill-Pond, Surrey - Morning in Late Autumn
  • signed and dated l.l.: G. P. Boyce. 1866-7.; also titled, signed and inscribed with the artist's address on a label attached to the backboard and further inscribed, dated and signed on the reverse of the mount: for A.T.Squarey Esq. March 66 April 67 Abinger Mill Pond George P. Boyce 
  • watercolour
  • 32 by 40cm., 12½ by 15¾in.

Provenance

Purchased directly from the artist by A. T. Squarey Esq. in 1867;
Mrs J. M. Hadley until her death, c.May 1949 when given by a member of her family (Charrington) to Philip E. W. Street;
John Nicholson Fine Art Auctioneers, Haslemere, 17 March 2004, lot 656;
Peter Nahum, London, July 2004

Exhibited

London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, Summer Exhibition, no.224;
Burslem, Wedgwood Institute, Art Exhibition, 1869, no.7

Literature

The Art Journal, 1867, p.147;
Christopher Newall and Judy Egerton, George Price Boyce, exhibition catalogue for The Tate Gallery, 1987, p.26;
Virginia Surtees (editor), The Diaries of George Price Boyce, 1980, p.24

Condition

The sheet appears to be sound. Very slightly discoloured otherwise appears in very good overall condition. Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame; unexamined out of frame.
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Catalogue Note

In the 1850s and 1860s Boyce often left his studio in London to spend extended periods sketching in the Surrey countryside, embracing the Pre-Raphaelite principle of painting outdoors. He had a boat on the Thames which he used to travel between Goring, Pangbourne, Streatley and Mapledurham. The artist George Dunlop Leslie described one of the sketching trips he made with Boyce: ‘At Pangbourne I met my friend G. P. Boyce, the watercolour artist, who was lodging at Champ’s picturesque little cottage on the edge of the weir pool. The rooms were very old and small, and it pleased Mr Boyce’s taste to hang amongst the humble cottage pictures one or two precious little works by D Rossetti. He had brought with him also some of his favourite old blue tea-cups and plates.’

In the present watercolour Boyce captured the serenity of the still waters of the mill-pond reflecting the autumnal colours of the trees and silvery sky, the only movement being the white swan that glides across the foreground. It depicts the pond beside the seventeenth century watermill close to the village of Abinger, also known as Elwix Mill. It had been built as a gun-powder mill but in the nineteenth century it was used for milling corn.

It has been written that, ‘Of all Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters Boyce gives the greatest sense of the everyday life of the countryside; the clamour of birdsong, the murmur of water in the millpond and the rustle of poplar leaves even on a still summer’s day, speaking to the modern spectator as if they had never been interrupted.’  (Christopher Newall and Judy Egerton, George Price Boyce, exhibition catalogue for The Tate Gallery, 1987, p.26)