Richard Parkes Bonington

Richard Parkes Bonington was born in Arnold near Nottingham, the son of a portrait painter of indifferent talent and quixotic temperament. In autumn 1817 the family established a lace manufactur-ing business in Calais, where Bonington studied watercolor painting briefly with the Anglo-French artist Louis Francia (1772-1839). Two years later he enrolled in the atelier of Gros (q.v.) but was an irregular student. His disillusionment with Gros lead to a stormy departure in 1822. In the same year he exhibited at the Paris Salon topographical watercolors from the first of his several tours of Normandy. These established his repu-tation as a landscape painter and drafts-man of medieval architecture. However, the group of five marine paintings submitted to the 1824 Salon, for which he was awarded a gold medal, confirmed his preeminence in the French romantic school. Bonington made the first of sev-eral trips to London in 1825, after which he shared a studio with Eugène Delacroix (q.v.) in Paris until his departure for a brief tour of Northern Italy in April 1826. It was Delacroix who persuaded Bonington to expand his interests beyond landscape to include figural subjects. In the final two hectic years of his life, Bonington produced mostly Venetian views and historical and literary illustra-tions, which he exhibited at both the 1827-28 Paris Salon and the 1828 Royal Academy exhibitions. He died in London from tuberculosis in September 1828. Despite the brevity of his career, Bonington's protean originality and dazzling virtuoso style inspired a host of French and British imitators, while his relationships with Delacroix and the landscape painters Eugène Isabey (1803-1886) and Paul Huet (1803-1869) would be of cardinal importance to the subsequent development of French painting.

Text © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2024