While he is best remembered as one of the most celebrated musical prodigies of his age, William Crotch applied himself with equal seriousness to drawing and painting, producing works whose assured technique and distinctive style established his standing among early nineteenth-century British watercolourists. Born in 1775, Crotch achieved considerable early fame as “the musical phenomenon of Norwich”, playing the organ to King George III at three and a half years old, and becoming organist of Christ Church, Oxford at fifteen. [1] Alongside his musical career, which included his appointment as the first Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in 1822, Crotch devoted himself to watercolour painting, encouraged from his early years in Oxford by his friend and mentor, the German-born musician-artist John Baptist Malchair. 

Goose Cottage, Windsor, painted on 23 October 1815 at six o’clock in the evening, is a remarkably free and accomplished example of Crotch’s work. The inscription on the reverse reflects his characteristic practice of precisely recording location, date, and exact time of execution, a method inherited from Malchair, which Crotch would famously pass on to John Constable after they first met in London around 1806. As Crotch later recounted, Malchair also taught him to ‘walk about your subject’ before beginning, shifting vantage points until the most compelling composition revealed itself, even if ‘thou hast but twenty minutes to spare’. [2]

Crotch described drawing as ‘a source of amusement, after the fatigue of professional duties… [so essential] that I could not decide which I love best of these two sisters.’ [3] His daily sketching walks from his home in Kensington to the Royal Academy of Music in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square—‘distended by paint-boxes and sketch-books’—and his habit of inviting pupils to examine ‘any additions he had made on his walk through Kensington Gardens’ reveal how closely art was woven into his daily life. [4]