Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Sold to Cecil Wedmore for £10–10. Cecil Wedmore had been at Irwin Sharpe's Quaker School with Tuke in Weston–Super–Mare.
  Later Tuke writes he bought it back from Wedmore and lent it to Mrs Altman in 1923.
  Private Collection, U.K.
  
  EXHIBITED:
  Liverpool, September 1883
  London, 19th Century Art Society, Conduit Street Gallery, February 1884
  
  The present lot is a rare example of Henry Scott Tuke's early pre-Newlyn work.
  Painted in Dielette, Normandy in June 1883, it is one of two paintings he completed whilst staying for a month with his friends, the painters Albert Chevalier Tayler and Emile Tremblay at Dielette, near Flamanville. Tremblay was a fellow artist studying with Tuke in Paris at Jean Paul Laurens studio. Like Tuke, Tremblay was a great friend of Thomas Cooper and Carrie Gotch and they had introduced the two artists to each other. Tuke had used Tremblay's studio earlier in the year to paint a portrait of another student Fred Millard, on show that summer in the Paris Salon.
  
  In Dielette, the painters stayed in the house of M. Hochet and Tuke describes painting this particular picture from Hochet's window. He wrote to Gotch from Dielette on 9 June 1883, 'This is a fine place with lots to do.' However, they had arrived when there was an outbreak of small pox in the village and Tuke was anxious enough to consider being vaccinated. But the distractions of the place seemed to have overcome his fears and he wrote, 'We have had the most gorgeous bathes in the morning off the jetty, dives up to any height from a flight of steps, into clear water like Cornish sea.'
  
  Although a relatively rare maritime composition, viewed from an interior on shore through a window, there is a great deal about this painting that points to Tuke's future life in Cornwall and the predominant subjects of his art: The wooden rigged ships at anchor in a harbour; a boy rowing a boat with a dog in the water; and the red article of clothing contrasting, in this case, with the green-blue sea.
  It is also a painting which is predominantly about reflections of light, whether the sky reflected in the water or light on the window panes, Tuke shows in this work that he is already at the tender age of 25 very skilful at capturing these subtle nuances.
  
  This painting is listed in Tuke's register of paintings as R24. Tuke also undertook another painting at the same time called Loading Granite at Dielette (whereabouts unknown).
  
  We are grateful to Catherine Wallace for her assistance in cataloguing this lot.

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Category: Fine Art / 19th Century Paintings

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