Nothing is known of Ann Sanders beyond the fact that she seems to have been the earliest pupil of the watercolor artist Francis Towne, after whose work she made this drawing in the late 1770s. She featured in the exhibition Francis Towne held at the Tate Gallery, Millbank, and Leeds City Art Gallery in 1997-8. Towne was known for his landscapes, with their curving foliage outlined in curling strokes of the pen and watercolor washes, and light effects which created a sense of freshness and immediacy He worked at a time when watercolor painting was coming to the fore as an art practice in its own right and followed the principles of art training of his age, His students made copies from prints, and then from drawings and watercolors.
But rather than faithfully reproducing Towne's example, Sanders has reworked her teacher's monochrome drawing to add a compositional complexity of her own. Her delicate lines describe a new addition, a figure with a horse, which gives her drawing greater interest and spatial depth in the contrast between the foreground
and the trees than was present in Towne's original. And she has illuminated her scene with rays of light falling from the left, demonstrating to her teacher that she could both successfully emulate, and move beyond, his practice. |
