Ben Elwes Fine Art for London Art Week Winter 2019 has assembled a group of works with an Anglo-American theme.

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Particularly appropriate, given that 2019 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the great 19th-century British artist and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), is a c.1879 watercolour on paper which he owned, having acquired it directly from the American artist, Thomas Moran (1837-1926).

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Moran was renowned for his majestic landscapes of the American West and his work was much admired by Ruskin. The two men developed a friendship during the artist’s visit to England in 1882, when Ruskin advised Thomas Moran to ‘study nature carefully and reproduce her wonders accurately’.

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The watercolour depicts Mount Superior, as viewed from Alta, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, located in the Wasatch Mountain Range. Executed en plein air, rather than in the artist’s studio, the drawing was part of a commission from the Grand Pacific Railway, to promote tourism to the region.

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This watercolour is at the intersection of important transatlantic historical events: the promotion of travel to the American West, with the celebration of its natural landscape recorded by contemporary artists; as well as being a document of the appreciation of Moran’s exhibited works in England, led by Ruskin, the most renowned art theorist and critic of Victorian England. 

Other works in the display at Ben Elwes on the theme of the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the USA include a Portrait of Queen Charlotte, 1776-77 by the Anglo-American artist, Benjamin West (1738-1820), one of the only examples of the many royal portraits by the artist not in the Royal Collection.

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Born to a rural innkeeping family in Springfield, Pennsylvania, Benjamin West was a Quaker who, remarkably, went on to become Historical Painter to George III and the second President of the Royal Academy. 

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From the same period, and only recently identified as the sitter, is a portrait of the renowned actress, author and feminist Mrs Mary Robinson (1758-1800) dressed as a nun, c.1780, by the Revolutionary-period Boston artist John Singleton Copley (1738-1815).

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Born to a rural innkeeping family in Springfield, Pennsylvania, Benjamin West was a Quaker who, remarkably, went on to become Historical Painter to George III and the second President of the Royal Academy. 

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From the same period, and only recently identified as the sitter, is a portrait of the renowned actress, author and feminist Mrs Mary Robinson (1758-1800) dressed as a nun, c.1780, by the Revolutionary-period Boston artist John Singleton Copley (1738-1815).