Watercolour over pencil heightened with white on
two sheets of laid paper joined
14.2 by 40.2 cm., 5 ½ by 15 ¾ in.
Provenance:
With Thos. Agnews, circa 1981
Taverner was a lawyer by profession, inheriting
his father’s position as Procurator-General of the Court of Arches of
Canterbury, based in Bow Church, London, but he was also a highly skilled
artist. The engraver George Vertue records in one of his notebooks in 1733: `Mr
Taverner about Aeta 30 (beside his practice in the Law) has a wonderfull genius
to drawing of Landskap in an excellent manner, adorned with figures in a stile
above the common’ (George Vertue, `The Notebooks of George Vertue’, Walpole Society, vol. 3, p.68).
According to Martin Hardie, he was `our first regular and systematic painter of
free landscapes in watercolour’ (Martin Hardie, Water-colour Painting in Britain, 1966, vol. I, p.69).
The majority of his works are of
imaginary Italianate compositions in the manner of Claude and Poussin although
he appears never to have visited Italy. He was one of the earliest exponents of
the combination of watercolour and bodycolour as the lead white bodycolour on
the present drawing indicates. A number of his works are in the same panoramic
format. A drawing from the Oppé collection in the Tate Gallery measures 7 ½ by
18 inches and is also on two sheets of paper (see Anne Lyles and Robin Hamlyn, British Watercolours from the Oppé
Collection, 1997, p.50, no.7, ill. p.51).