Coinciding with a flourishing public interest in watercolour landscapes in France in the early 1820s was an appreciation for brown wash drawings fuelled in large part by the collecting craze for albums of artists’ drawings. The masters of this genre were Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Hippolyte de Bourg d'Orschwiller, who regularly exhibited finished sepia drawings of Italian and French views at the Salons - the biennial exhibitions of the works of living French artists. For a brief period between 1818 and 1824, Bonington produced a prodigious number of such wash drawings, including many marines that relate immediately to the practice of his first teacher, François-Louis-Thomas Francia, and to the sepia-toned mezzotint plates of J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studiorum, of which Bonington owned numerous impressions.

This drawing dates on the stylistic evidence to Bonington’s earliest years in France, c.1818-20, and may be compared to Calais Pier, Low Tide in the Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria. Unlike many marine painters Bonington rarely painted imaginary scenes. Most of his coastal views can be identified by topographical or other landmarks. In this instance, the topography resembles that near Fécamp in Picardy. He would contribute a different view of the entrance to the port of Fécamp to the important illustrated publication Excursions sur les côtes et dans les ports de France (Paris, 1823).

 Patrick Noon