Thomas Shotter Boys (1803-1874) was an English watercolourist and pioneering lithographer, best remembered as the closest artistic follower of Richard Parkes Bonington and as the creator of the first English book illustrated entirely with colour lithographic plates. Born in Pentonville, London, the son of a salesman, he was apprenticed to the engraver George Cooke between 1817 and 1823, training that gave him an exceptionally sound grounding in printmaking later evident in the clarity and precision of his watercolour style. On completing his apprenticeship he travelled to Paris, where he met Bonington, who persuaded him to set aside engraving in favour of painting; the two became close friends, with Boys living only a few streets from Bonington's studio, and Boys was deeply affected by Bonington's early death in 1828, completing and publishing an unfinished etching of Bologna as a tribute later that year.
Through Bonington, Boys was drawn into an influential circle of Paris-based artists and writers that included Eugène Delacroix and the young Prosper Mérimée, as well as fellow British watercolourists including the Fielding brothers and William Callow, with whom he later shared a Paris studio; Callow himself, in later life, firmly disputed the frequently repeated claim that Boys had formally been Bonington's pupil, insisting the relationship was one of friendship and mutual influence rather than tuition. Boys divided his time between London and Paris through the 1820s and 1830s, exhibiting at both the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, and in 1839 published his masterpiece, Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen, etc., a landmark collection of chromolithographs that a contemporary review hailed as the first fully successful demonstration of colour lithography, and for which King Louis-Philippe sent Boys a ring in personal recognition of its merits. He followed this in 1842 with Original Views of London As It Is, an equally significant topographical record of Regency London, and continued to work as a lithographer, illustrator and drawing master, including etching plates for Ruskin's Stones of Venice, before his career went into decline in later years, partly through ill health, and he died in London in 1874.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings connect Boys directly to William Callow, his close friend and Paris studio companion, allowing the closely related but genuinely distinct watercolour practices of these two significant figures in the Bonington tradition to be considered together within the gallery's collection.