Lot 306: WILLIAM JAMES BLACKLOCK 1816-1858

signed and dated l.r.: W J Blacklock 1854

oil on canvas

33 by 56 cm., 13 by 22 in.

London, Royal Academy, 1851, no. 419

William James Blacklock was born in Carlisle but lived and exhibited in London and painted mainly in Cumberland. He attended the Academy at Carlisle and was taught by Matthew Ellis Nutter (1795-1862). His landscapes have a fascinating Pre-Raphaelite quality similar to the early work of William Inchbold and William Dyce. Greatly admired by John Ruskin who wrote in Modern Painters 'some of the best and most substantial renderings of the green and turfy masses of our lower hills are to be found in the drawings of Blacklock' and also by Turner who saw great promise in the young artist, he was destined for continued greatness. Thomas Creswick and William Bell Scott also singled him out for praise and David Roberts bought one of his landscapes (see also lot 309 for another painting owned by Roberts). Collectors of his work included Edwin Bullock of Birmingham, the great Pre-Raphaelite collector James Leathart in Newcastle and William Gladstone. Unfortunately the genius of Blacklock was cut short as he began to loose his eyesight in the early 1850s, followed by the onslaught of the mental illness which had led his brother to take his own life. Blacklock began to be quarrelsome, to drink heavily and to become violent. In 1854 he was blighted by an epileptic attack from which he never recovered. He was admitted to the Royal Mental Institution in Dumphries in November 1855 and died three years later, the day before his forty-second birthday. As a result of his short career, Blacklock's work is rare and the only major collection of his paintings and drawings is at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle.

An Old Mill Near Haweswater appears to depict the same dilapidated building that he had painted in the background of A Lakeland Landscape with a Manor House and Beehives painted in 1850 (Christie's, 7 June 1996, lot. 579), both pictures depicting the scenes which The Dictionary of National Biography described as 'lonely border towers, deeply embosomed in waving foliage, and bathing in the light of a golden sunset; remote and almost inaccessible tarns, surrounded by rough mountains, upon whose sides the shadows of light clouds danced merrily; brawling brooks with overhanging rocks and waving trees, were the scenes which he admired and loved to paint.'

In 1936, the villages of Measand and Mardale in the Haweswater area of Westmoreland (Cumbria) were flooded to create a reservoir to supply the people of Manchester. A community which had changed little for generations were moved away and buildings which had stood for centuries were lost beneath the lake waters. Parts of the masonry of some of the lost buildings appear above the water of the reservoir during times of drought.