Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART THOMAS HARTLEY CROMEK London 1809-1873 Wakefield Study of Mullein, Ariccia Watercolour, over traces of a pencil underdrawing. Signed, inscribed and dated T.H. CROMEK / Ariccia / 11 Augt. 1845., over pencil, at the bottom centre. 183 x 208 mm. (7 1/4 x 8 1/8 in.) Much of what is known of Thomas Hartley Cromek’s life and career is based on a journal he wrote, entitled Reminiscences at Home and Abroad, 1812-1855, which only came to light in the latter half of the 20th century. (The manuscript remains unpublished, and is today in the possession of one of the artist’s descendants.) The son of an engraver and editor, Cromek was born in London and educated in Wakefield in Yorkshire, later completing his studies in Leeds. He first travelled to Italy in 1830, accompanying his mother to Florence and Rome, where she had gone for the sake of her health. In Rome he met the brothers Edward and Henry Cheney, who became his first important patrons, and made numerous watercolours of the churches and ruins of the Eternal City, which proved commercially successful. Cromek was to spend much of the next twenty years living and working in the country, mainly in Rome and Florence, but with occasional visits back to England. Cromek met and befriended several English artists in Italy, including Clarkson Stanfield, Joseph Severn and John Frederick Lewis, and he gave drawing lessons to several distinguished English visitors, including, in November 1837, Edward Lear. That same year several of Cromek’s watercolours were acquired by Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany; an honour which firmly established the artist’s reputation and led to numerous commissions in both Florence and Rome. In 1843 two of his watercolours were purchased by Queen Victoria, and the decade of the 1840s found Cromek at the height of his success. The artist made two trips to Greece, in 1834 and 1845, during which he painted some of his finest watercolours. In 1849 Cromek was forced to leave Rome by the outbreak of the First Italian War of Independence, and he returned to England for good. The following year he exhibited four works at the Royal Academy and was elected to the New Society of Painters in Water Colours as an associate member. However, he never achieved the same level of success in England as he had in Italy. Cromek seems to have produced almost no paintings after 1860, as his health gradually failed and he lost the use of his hands, and he died in relative obscurity in Yorkshire in 1873. The present sheet was drawn during the summer of 1845 at Ariccia, a town near Lake Nemi in the Roman Campagna, south of the city. Cromek often made sketching expeditions around the Campagna, including the towns of Ariccia, Frascati and Tivoli. Depicted in this watercolour is a flowering plant known as the great or common mullein (Verbascum thapsus), found throughout Europe and Asia but particularly common around the Mediterranean. The leaves of the mullein, which can grow to up to two metres in height, have long been used in traditional herbal medicine. Among stylistically comparable nature studies by Cromek is a drawing of A Branch with Leaves, one of several watercolours by the artist today in the possession of his great- grandson, Wilfrid Warrington1. A similar watercolour study of a mullein, inscribed and dated ‘Ariccia July 29, 1848’, is also in the collection of Cromek’s descendants. 1. Leeds, Harewood House and Bath, Holburne Museum, Thomas Hartley Cromek: A Classical Vision, exhibition catalogue, 1999-2000, p.38, fig.11. .

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