ANTHONY VANDYKE COPLEY FIELDING
1787, near Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire – 1855, Worthing, Sussex
Copley Fielding, as he is usually known, came from a family of artists, his father Nathan (1746/7-1819) and most of his brothers – Theodore (1781-1851), Frederick (1784-1853), Thales (1793-1837) and Newton (1797-1856) – pursuing artistic careers as painters and teachers (the exceptions were Frederick who became a barrister and Newton who specialised in engraving and lithography). The Lake District played a brief but important part in the brothers’ early lives when Nathan, a peripatetic artist from Yorkshire, spent periods living in Cumbria, first in Ambleside and then in Keswick, c.1804-7; one of the family’s neighbours in Ambleside was the artist Julius Caesar Ibbetson.
After a short period in Liverpool with his widowed father, Copley Fielding settled in London in 1809 and enjoyed a highly successful career as a watercolourist, becoming noted for his technical virtuosity. He was elected to full membership of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1812, later serving at different periods as its treasurer, secretary and finally president (from 1831 until his death). His many private pupils included John Ruskin (1819-1900) and his popularity with the public was matched by his prodigious output of exhibited watercolours. He showed some 1,750 works over the years at the SPWC alone.
In 1819-21 Copley’s eldest brother, Theodore, then still resident in the north of England, produced A Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes in association with J. Walton (who is generally assumed to be his brother-in-law). Copley himself, largely resident in the south, produced depictions of the Lakes consistently and copiously throughout his life. Dated examples in the Victoria & Albert Museum range from 1808 to 1845 while his Cumbrian exhibits at the SPWC between 1810 and 1854 run into many hundreds; on some occasions he included ten or even twenty Cumbrian drawings in a single exhibition. Not surprisingly, there was sometimes an overlap of subject-matter between the brothers and they collaborated on publishing ventures; an example of this is provided by the series of aquatints of the Wye (engraved by Theodore after scenes by Copley, c.1820-1) which eventually became Theodore’s book A Picturesque Description of the River Wye, published by Ackermann in 1841. The sheer quantity of Copley’s exhibited Cumbrian works during the very years that saw the production of Fielding and Walton’s Picturesque Tour of the English Lakes suggests close co-operation and reciprocal promotion if not, indeed, actual collaboration.
Three of the Fielding brothers (Theodore, Thales and Newton) had close professional links with France and French artists from 1821 onwards, eventually running a print-publishing business in Paris. Thanks to their association with the Anglophile publishing impresario J.-F. d’Ostervald (1773-1850), who fostered French interest in the quintessentially English art of watercolour, nine of Copley’s scenes were among some fifty British works shown at the Paris Salon in 1824 which became legendary for the sensation that it provoked: the British artists, who included the Royal Academy’s president Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), John Constable (1776-1837) and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28), took Paris by storm, with critics and painters praising the landscapists for their truth to nature, freshness and poetry. Constable, Bonington and Copley Fielding were all awarded gold medals for excellence.
Literature
Contemporary exhibition catalogues; The Antique Collectors’ Club, The Royal Watercolour Society. The First Fifty Years 1805-1855, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992; ODNB entry by Huon Mallalieu
4.6.2014
Powell, Cecilia
|
|
