Near Arundel
1882

• Ebenezer Wake COOK

The label identifying the maker appears on the reverse of the thin timber backing board of the blind stretcher onto which the watercolour is stretched. The frame, though damaged, is most likely the original framing of the watercolour and as such represents a form of presentation of watercolours in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The use of a wide gilded slip and a relatively narrow outer frame is closer to our expectation for the framing of these works. The company traded as Foord & Dickinson at Wardour St. from 1858 to 1899.¹ As with a number of labels, the address on this one has been over-printed. Though the watercolour and the frame are now separated they have been re-assembled digitally.

Note

1 Jacob Simon, The Art of the Picture Frame, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1996, p. 134.

The frame is constructed using composition ornaments on a thin wooden base. The profile is a solid wooden section while the composition decorative panels appear to be machine rolled. The ornate foliate corners are more coarsely cast than the panels. Leaves extend across the mitres of the outer frame structure. The surface of the outer frame, now dark, appears to be oil gilded, through to the edge of the shallow scotia, where it changes to a bright water gilded surface on a red bole and white ground. The slip is a wide timber section and retains the original matte water gilding, on a thin red bole, in a very good state of preservation due to having spent most of its life glazed.

The frame appears to retain the original surfaces. The composition ornaments to the corners are incomplete and have been reconstructed digitally.