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Album of watercolors and drawings., 1777-1935, 1790-1835

Title: Album of watercolors and drawings. 1777-1935 1790-1835

The collection primarily consists of an album filled with drawings, prints, ephemera, and manuscript poems, letters, dedicatory inscriptions, and notes collected or created by John Charles Denham. The album contains 107 small drawings and sketches in graphite, ink, and watercolor by prominent British artists from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Richard Parkes Bonington, John Flaxman, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner, and Benjamin West, as well as Denham's cohort in the Society of Young Painters: François Louis Thomas Francia, Thomas Girtin, Sir Robert Ker Porter, and Augustus Wall Callcott. Many of the drawings are signed but most are undated, and appear to have been added to the book between the early 1830s and the mid-1850s. Several bear small paper tags with references to unidentified "Old 'Water Colour' Society" volumes and folios. Among the drawings are portrait sketches of James Boswell, Maria Cosway, William Cowper, John Charles Denham, and Sarah Siddons, as well as the title character of Henry Mackenzie's novel Julia de Roubigné. The artist most prominently represented in the album is Sir Thomas Lawrence, with fifteen drawings, one etching, two letters, and a signature clipped from an unidentified document; the most prominent family represented is the painter/author Sir Robert Ker Porter and his sisters, the novelists Jane and Anna Maria Porter. Also present are watercolor landscapes by the wife and daughter of portrait painter Thomas Phillips and three members of the Batty family, and several drawings by Denham's young stepson Henry Thomas Hamilton (d.1813). Two drawings in the album have historically been attributed to Thomas Gainsborough and one to John Hamilton Mortimer.

ArchivalResource: 0.42 linear feet (1 box)

http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.denham View