Home
Shopping cart (0 items € 0)
Go Back

Watercolour coastal profiles in the East Indies and elsewhere, by the maritime painter to King George III

POCOCK, Nicholas.
East India views islands headlands &c.
[London, ca. 1790?- ca. 1805]. Ten watercolour coastal profiles in grey and blue, of widely varying sizes (30 to 119 cm long), with contemporary captions and other notes in pencil or black ink. 20th-century brown cloth with the artist's original laid-paper wrappers bound at the end. [10] drawings.
€ 28,000
A series of ten lovely coastal profiles drawn in watercolour by the English artist Nicholas Pocock (1740-1821), showing coasts and mountains in the East Indies, both coasts of the Indian Ocean, China and the South Atlantic. In the first drawing Mount Agung, an active volcano and the highest mountain on Bali, appears prominently, with its pointed peak sticking up above the clouds. Pocock, son of a Bristol merchant mariner, began a career in the merchant marine, but had been an amateur painter since childhood. As master mariner of the ship Lloyd, owned by the Quaker merchant Richard Champion, he illustrated his logbooks with fine ink and wash coastal profiles and other drawings (some now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich). When Champion went bankrupt in 1778 (as a result of the American Revolution), Pocock devoted himself to painting. His first efforts as a professional drew praise from Joshua Reynolds and he exhibited at the Royal Academy beginning in 1782. Pocock soon became a celebrated maritime artist and maritime painter to King George III, moving to London in 1789. He sometimes accompanied naval ships to make sketches and notes that he developed into paintings when back in London.
With a small tear at the head of drawing 9, not approaching the image, drawing 7 spotted and slightly dirty, but further in very good condition. For Pocock: ODNB 22425.
Order Inquire Terms of sale

Related Subjects:

Art, architecture & photography  >  Drawings, Prints & Watercolours
Asia  >  Drawings, Photographs, Prints & Watercolours | Indonesia
Maritime history  >  Drawings, Prints & Watercolours