Henry Walton
Mallard Ducks in a Basket
oil on panel
39.7 x 46.6 cm. (15 ⅝ x 18 ⅜ in.)
Gallery Notes
Henry Walton was an East Anglian portrait painter whose most celebrated sitters were the historian Edward Gibbon, the Rev. William Gilpin and Horatio Walpole, the first earl of Orford. Among the two hundred and twenty or so recorded paintings by Walton are a handful of subjects which might be termed ‘domestic genre’, and which reveal a knowledge of the great French artists Chardin and Greuze.
Walton’s friend, the Norfolk antiquarian Dawson Turner, claimed that in 1774 and 1775, when he did not exhibit, Walton ‘with a view of studying or of buying pictures….made frequent journeys to Paris.’ Here, where genre paintings and engravings were widely available, he must have seen and admired Chardin’s quiet interior scenes of kitchen maids at work, children and other domestic activities. Perhaps in search of fresh subject matter, a change from his portrait work and rejecting religious and allegorical subjects, Walton seems to have readily embraced this more contemplative style of painting, as seen in his next exhibited work, Girl plucking a Turkey (Society of Artists, 1776, now Tate Britain, NO2870), a painting that was bought for the National Gallery in 1912, not long after passing for an authentic Chardin at auction.
Before the idea of these ‘fancy pictures’ became ‘vulgarised’ (in Waterhouse’s word) by Francis Wheatley and George Morland, Walton explored the idiom further with Girl buying a Ballad (1778) (Tate Britain, TO7594), Figures with a Fruit Barrow (1779) The Hand Maid, The Tobacco Box and others, all of which were engraved and published. Among them was The Market Girl of 1776-7 (Yale Center for British Art, B1981.25.650), renamed in the popular mezzotint by John Raphael Smith as The Silver Age, in which a girl rests by the wayside, wrapped up against the cold and carrying her basket of chickens either to or from market. No doubt mindful of the still life paintings he had seen in Paris, Walton elaborated upon the idea of domestic fowls neatly carried in straw-lined baskets on at least two occasions, here in our unrecorded painting of mallards and its pendant, The Chicken Basket (oil on panel, sold Christie’s 8th July 2016, lot 184, Bell no. 200). The wicker basket in both is identical, and not very unlike the one carried by The Market Girl. In all three the artist’s handling of the loose straw and ears of corn around the edge is distinctively similar, as is the skilful handling of the birds’ plumage. It is exciting to be able to offer this valuable new addition to the relatively obscure school of still life painting in Georgian England, and to broaden our appreciation of the work of this dignified and versatile artist.
- James Mitchell, May 2026
Bibliography:
Dawson Turner (1775-1858), Outline of Lithography, Yarmouth, 1840;Evelyne Bell, ‘The Life and Work of Henry Walton’ in Gainsborough’s House REVIEW 1998/99, pp. 39-104.
Henry Walton was an East Anglian portrait painter whose most celebrated sitters were the historian Edward Gibbon, the Rev. William Gilpin and Horatio Walpole, the first earl of Orford. Among the two hundred and twenty or so recorded paintings by Walton are a handful of subjects which might be termed ‘domestic genre’, and which reveal a knowledge of the great French artists Chardin and Greuze.
Walton’s friend, the Norfolk antiquarian Dawson Turner, claimed that in 1774 and 1775, when he did not exhibit, Walton ‘with a view of studying or of buying pictures….made frequent journeys to Paris.’ Here, where genre paintings and engravings were widely available, he must have seen and admired Chardin’s quiet interior scenes of kitchen maids at work, children and other domestic activities. Perhaps in search of fresh subject matter, a change from his portrait work and rejecting religious and allegorical subjects, Walton seems to have readily embraced this more contemplative style of painting, as seen in his next exhibited work, Girl plucking a Turkey (Society of Artists, 1776, now Tate Britain, NO2870), a painting that was bought for the National Gallery in 1912, not long after passing for an authentic Chardin at auction.
Before the idea of these ‘fancy pictures’ became ‘vulgarised’ (in Waterhouse’s word) by Francis Wheatley and George Morland, Walton explored the idiom further with Girl buying a Ballad (1778) (Tate Britain, TO7594), Figures with a Fruit Barrow (1779) The Hand Maid, The Tobacco Box and others, all of which were engraved and published. Among them was The Market Girl of 1776-7 (Yale Center for British Art, B1981.25.650), renamed in the popular mezzotint by John Raphael Smith as The Silver Age, in which a girl rests by the wayside, wrapped up against the cold and carrying her basket of chickens either to or from market. No doubt mindful of the still life paintings he had seen in Paris, Walton elaborated upon the idea of domestic fowls neatly carried in straw-lined baskets on at least two occasions, here in our unrecorded painting of mallards and its pendant, The Chicken Basket (oil on panel, sold Christie’s 8th July 2016, lot 184, Bell no. 200). The wicker basket in both is identical, and not very unlike the one carried by The Market Girl. In all three the artist’s handling of the loose straw and ears of corn around the edge is distinctively similar, as is the skilful handling of the birds’ plumage. It is exciting to be able to offer this valuable new addition to the relatively obscure school of still life painting in Georgian England, and to broaden our appreciation of the work of this dignified and versatile artist.
- James Mitchell, May 2026
Bibliography:
Dawson Turner (1775-1858), Outline of Lithography, Yarmouth, 1840;Evelyne Bell, ‘The Life and Work of Henry Walton’ in Gainsborough’s House REVIEW 1998/99, pp. 39-104.
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