Signed with the artist’s monogram l.r.

Watercolour, 20 by 27.5 cm

Provenance: Spink & Sons

On his death in 1899, his obituarist in The Times described Birket Foster as “certainly the most popular watercolourist of our time.” Foster presented the Victorian public with an arcadian vision of the English landscape, perpetually bathed in the rays of the midday sun or in the warm glow of a summer’s evening. This was exactly what they wanted and it is no coincidence that Cadbury’s used his landscapes on chocolate boxes from the 1860s onwards. The river Thames and its barges was a subject of many of his greatest landscapes which, like the present work, proved the perfect subject and medium for his finely tuned and distinctive stippled technique as a watercolourist.