Francis Towne

(Isleworth 1739-1816)

The Lady Chapel of Glastonbury Abbey

Footnotes

Provenance
Bequeathed by the artist in 1816 to James White of Exeter (1744-1825) on whose death it passed to Towne's residuary legatee John Herman Merivale (1779-1844) and his successors
His grandson George Montagu Merivale (b.1855) of Sydney, Australia
His daughter Angel Merivale (b.1884)
[?]R.Madoc
Sale, Lawrence's, Crewkerne 22 May 1980, lot 83, (£1,600)
Sale, Sotheby's, London, 11 July 1990, lot 60, (£9,500) where purchased by a private collector by whom it was gifted to the present owners

Exhibited
Possibly, London, No. 20 Lower Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, Exhibition of Original Drawings at the Gallery, 1805, no. 50 or 51 as 'Glastonbury Abbey'

Literature
A.P. Oppé, 'Francis Towne, landscape painter' in Walpole Society, vol. VIII, 1919-20, pp. 105-8 (regarding a large group of watercolours from 1777 most of which were in the collection of Mr and Mrs J. Merivale at Barton Place)
A. Bury, Francis Towne, London, 1962, p.29
T.Wilcox, Francis Towne, Tate Gallery, 1997, p.34
R. Stephens, A Catalogue Raisonné of Francis Towne (1739-1816), online, cat. no. FT117


This watercolour dates from a very productive period in Towne's life. The tour of Wales in the summer of 1777 to which the present drawing belongs was his first sketching trip outside Devon and over the ten years that followed, he travelled round England, Wales and the Continent going as far afield as Italy. The 1777 tour in the company of his friend James White is bookended by a sketch of Bridgenorth in Shropshire dated 20 June (no.1 in the series), and the two views of Glastonbury (nos. 53 and 54) which were done on his return to Exeter at the very end of July. The second Glastonbury drawing, which is taken from the exterior looking in, is dated 30 July suggesting a probable date for the present work.

The highly original technique that we associate with Towne was not achieved, as one might think, by his sketching in pen and 'filling in the blanks' with watercolour. It was the product of a multi-stage process that involved working repeatedly on a single composition, as Timothy Wilcox explains in his catalogue for the Towne exhibition at Tate Britain (T. Wilcox, Francis Towne, Tate Gallery 1997). Towne started with an on-the-spot sketch in graphite or pen and ink, and inscribed the date and location of the drawing on the reverse. Then, usually in the studio, he added colour or monochrome wash and drew over it again in ink; he would sign, date and often number the front and lay the drawing down on a wash-line mount that he himself made. He then wrote the inscription on the reverse of this mount, since - as in the case of the present watercolour - the inscription on the back of the original sheet was by now obscured. Occasionally the inscriptions are very extensive and take the form of a short essay.

The ink outlines which characterise Towne's works were intended to give his watercolours the sense of the immediacy of a sketch as he did not regard them as finished works in their own right, rather as preparatory studies: his real ambition was to be recognised as a landscape painter, and it is therefore ironic that his finished oil paintings never attracted the acclaim of his highly original watercolours. His attachment to pen outline probably accounted in part for his falling into relative obscurity after his death; in the late 18th century he was going against the flow in artistic terms, his contemporaries expressing themselves increasingly in tone rather than line as we see in Turner's atmospheric and semi-abstracted late watercolours. Yet it is precisely this technique that contributed to his resurgence in popularity in the 20th century: his economic outlines and clean blocks of colour resonate with us today and give his compositions a remarkably modern sense of design that draws comparison with artists like John Nash. Despite the fact that he never felt his abilities as a landscape painter were appreciated during his own lifetime he was prescient enough to leave a large group of his watercolour sketches to the nation on his death, so we benefit from a holding of well over 100 well-preserved examples in the British Museum collection.

Glastonbury Abbey was founded in the 7th century and was added to in the 10th century by the abbot St Dunstan, who subsequently became Archbishop of Canterbury in 960. By the time the Domesday Book was completed in 1086 it was the richest and one of the most powerful abbeys in England, controlling large areas of the surrounding land. It succumbed to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the last abbot, Richard Whyting, was unceremoniously put to death on Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Over the following centuries the buildings were plundered for their lead and dressed stone so that by the time Towne visited the abbey in the late 18th century it had fallen into ruin. Apart from its significance as a powerful christian centre Glastonbury has had more romantic associations; some believe that it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea in the 1st century and others have identified it as Avalon, the legendary burial place of King Arthur. With its ruinous appearance and historic connotations it would have provided an evocative subject with which to end Towne's sketching tour in the summer of 1777.