Oil on panel, 40 by 28 cm

Provenance: from a direct descendant of the artist

A precocious talent, Watson joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1889, winning the school’s Silver Medal in 1889 and 1891 and the Landseer Scholarship in 1892. He exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy in 1891, aged only 23. His exceptional ability as a painter in oil led to significant commissions and he rose to become one of the most significant and talented portrait and genre painters of the Edwardian period. The present oil sketch records a trip made to Switzerland by Watson and his wife Hilda in the early 1920s. Such works, not intended for exhibition, remained in his studio following his death, but display the same outstanding and natural facility with the medium that can been observed in his larger works.