Numbered ‘6’ on the original wash mount
Pen and grey ink and watercolour over pencil on laid
paper
34.1 by 47.6 cm., 13 ¼ by 18 ¾ ins.
William Day (1764-1807) is an interesting and
accomplished amateur artist. He
exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1782 and 1801 as an Honorary
Exhibitor. The brief facts about Day and
his work were assembled by the late Judy Egerton in an article in
Connoisseur magazine in July 1970, pp. 176-185, which remains the main
source of information on his life. It is
not known for certain when Day met John Webber, the Swiss-born artist, who
adopted an English spelling of his surname and is now chiefly famous for
accompanying Captain Cook on his last expedition to the South Seas between 1776
and 1780. The Connoisseur article
notes, without giving a source, that their friendship “began about 1787”.
Certainly Day and Webber were sketching together in the Wye valley in 1788,
which is the first time that pairs of views by the two artists of the same
subject are known to exist. Two
watercolours by Webber of Chepstow Castle dated 1788, which are now in the
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (D.1900.12 & D.1970.77)
(see Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in the Whitworth Art Gallery,
2003, p. 282) correspond to two watercolours by Day which were acquired by
Chepstow Museum in 2012.
In 1789 Day and Webber again travelled together and
made a tour of Derbyshire. Their exact
route is not known but surviving drawings indicate that they visited all the
main spots, including Matlock, Cromford, Dovedale and Castleton. The tour is described and a number of
drawings from it illustrated in the 1996 Berne and Manchester Webber exhibition
catalogue (see W. Hauptman, Captain Cook’s Painter: John Webber 1751-1793 Pacific Voyager and
Landscape Artist, 1996, pp. 193-214). Several other pairs of Day and Webber
drawings have been identified, some quite recently, from this tour. This watercolour is one such recent
identification. Day watercolours are
normally mounted on a secondary support with a grey wash border within which is
a number; sometimes there is an additional identifying inscription on the reverse. This example has the number ‘6’ but is not
inscribed on the reverse. Nevertheless,
it is possible to identify the view since it corresponds exactly with the
Webber watercolour inscribed “Heights at Dovedale, Derbyshire”, purchased by
the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, in 1952 (see E. Joll, Cecil Higgins
Art Gallery Watercolours and Drawings, 2002, p. 281).
There are only two other known pairs of Day and Webber
watercolours in public collections. The
first pair, of Renard’s Hole, Dovedale, is at the Yale Center for British
Art, New Haven, Connecticut (see W. Hauptman, op. cit., pp. 211 &
212). The second pair, of Peveril Castle
and the Peak Cavern, Castleton, was acquired from a private collection in 2011
by Buxton Museum & Art Gallery (see W. Hauptman, op. cit., pp. 196
& 197). At least four other pairs of
Day and Webber watercolours are known, but not in the same collection. Fifteen securely identifiable Derbyshire
views by Day from 1789 are now known, but the highest number recorded on their
mounts is 26, indicating that at least eleven remain to be discovered.