BONINGTON, RICHARD PARKES Eng lish painter, was born at Arnold, near Nottingham, Oct. 25, i8o1. His father, one time governor of Nottingham gaol, was also a drawing-master. In 1817 the family moved to Calais where the father started business in connection with the Nottingham lace trade. Here young Bonington became acquainted with Louis Francia, the friend of Girtin, who grounded him in the principles of English water-colour painting. Moving to Paris, he studied and copied the Dutch and Flemish masters in the Louvre. In 182o he entered the studio of Baron Gros, which was a meeting-place of revolutionary spirits.
In France at that time the classicist art of David was still pre dominant, but Gericault and Delacroix were preparing the romantic movement. Bonington met Delacroix at the Louvre and the two formed a close friendship. Both had the same passion for the new conception of historical painting, both studied the cos tumes and the new histories of the middle ages and the early Renaissance which attracted the writers and actors of the day. Bonington, who from his early youth in Nottingham had loved the theatre, clearly showed the influence of the stage on his designs. Repeated visits to London kept him in touch with English con temporary art when Constable was developing his own original conception of landscape painting. Bonington painted his first landscapes from nature in Normandy and Picardy. In 1822, on a visit to Venice, he produced a series of Venetian pictures. He re ceived the gold medal in the Salon of 1824. On his return to England, his works exhibited at the British Institution in 1826 and at the Royal Academy in 1828, excited admiration and he was be friended by Sir Thomas Lawrence. He died of consumption in London on Sept. 23, 1828. His early death deprived England of one of the fairest promises in the field of art, for although he had studied in France he belonged to both countries. His sparkling and luminous colour was a quality unknown in France at that time and was rivalled among English water-colourists only by Constable and Turner. Thus he brought the knowledge of English art to France, and linked the new vision of English landscapes to the art of the Barbizon school. Moreover, he possessed a dexterity in execution which has since become, among both artists and art lovers, a tradition in English painting.
Bonington's best known works are "Henry IV. and the Spanish Ambassador" in the Wallace collection, Londoa, and "Francis I. and the Duchesse d'Etampes" in the Louvre, Paris. Nowhere can Bonington's art be studied so well as in the Wallace collection which possesses oil and 25 water-colours. The Louvre and the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert museum, the Tate gallery, the British Museum print room, and most galleries in England possess specimens of his work. He produced a number of lithographs, of which the "Rue de la grosse Horloge a Rouen" is the most famous.
Bouvenne, Catalogue de l'oeuvre grave et lithographie de R. P. Bonington (1873) ; Hugh Stokes, Girtin and Bonington (1922) ; A. Dubuisson, Richard Parkes Bonington, His Life and Work (1924)• •