Yale Center for British Art

Creator:
Joseph Noel Paton, 1821–1901, British
Title:
Study from Nature: Inveruglas
Date:
1857
Materials & Techniques:
Watercolor and gouache on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream wove paper
Dimensions:
Sheet: 14 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches (36.8 x 52.1 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, and Mr. and Mrs. Bart T. Tiernan, Yale LLB 1968, with additional support from: Mr. and Mrs. Ronald R. Atkins; Elizabeth Ballantine, Yale BA 1971, MA 1974, MSL 1982, PhD 1986; Mr. and Mrs. Henry E. Bartels; The Ajax Foundation on behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Bressler; Bruce Budd; Homer Byington, III, Yale BA 1956; Mr. and Mrs. Norman C. Cross, Jr.; Lee MacCormick Edwards; The Forbes Foundation; Mr. and Mrs. Brian Hopkinson; Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Israel, Yale BA 1966; Katherine Haskins; Mr. and Mrs. Lowell Libson; Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Martin, Yale BA 1954; Virginia Mattern; Mona Pierpaoli and David Adler; and Mr. and Mrs. Ross D. Siragusa, Jr., Yale BA 1953
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B2008.20
Gallery Label:
Although titled by its creator as “Study from Nature,” this elaborately finished watercolor scarcely looks like a work done outdoors before the motif. Yet the Scottish artist Joseph Noel Paton, known for his history and fairy paintings, spent the month of August in 1857 with his brother the landscape painter Waller Hugh Paton (probably the figure shown in a kilt) on the banks of Loch Lomond, working laboriously from nature. Inspired by the critic John Ruskin, the two young Scots followed Ruskin’s exhortation to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.” Gallery label for A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions (Yale Center for British Art, 2017-06-01 - 2017-08-13)