Watercolor with pen and gray ink over graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream laid paper
Dimensions:
Mount: 10 1/4 × 23 1/2 inches (26 × 59.7 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1975.4.1956
Gallery Label:
Apart from a handful of atmospherically sensitive topographical views in the south of England, little is known of Jonathan Skelton before he embarked in 1757 for Italy, where he died two years later. Earlier in 1757 he produced a set of eight views of Canterbury and its environs, to which this drawing of the village of Harbledown belongs. Skelton’s topographical drawings reveal the sort of naturalistic concerns that would come more and more to the forefront of British landscape art as the century progressed. In his view of the leper’s hospital at Harbledown, Skelton seems more involved with the trees and old fences and tumbledown outbuildings than with the hospital itself, which can just be glimpsed through the trees. When he mounted the drawing, Skelton added a note that it had been made after a summer shower—the sort of meteorological notation the Romantic landscape painter John Constable would make some sixty or seventy years later. Gallery label for Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2007-04-18 - 2007-07-29)