Alfred William RICH, N.E.A.C. (1856-1921)

Alfred William RICH, N.E.A.C. (1856-1921) 
"An English Landscape", Circa 1914
Signed "A W Rich" lower left
Watercolour 
21.5 cm x  38 cm 

Provenance 
Private Collection, Surrey, UK

An interesting landscape by A.W. Rich which dedicates more than three-quarters of the composition to dramatic billowing clouds. The small sliver of countryside at the bottom of the picture includes a cottage, trees and a herd of cows, but everything on the earth is dwarfed by the huge and atmospheric sky above. 

In his essay on A.W. Rich, published in the anthology "The Loiterers Harvest" in 1913, E.V. Lucas wrote "I find upon his parallelograms of Whatman, ten inches by eight, or thereabouts, more of the vital England that I know and revere - beneath English sky and filled with English atmosphere - than in the water colours of any other man now painting."

A work which is typical of Rich's late style. The scene has not been identified but is possibly somewhere on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire as it is dated on stylistic grounds to after the artist's move from Sussex to Amersham in around 1910. The picture is painted on a rough "David Cox" heavy oatmeal wove paper, which had become the artist's preferred medium for particularly atmospheric subjects.  

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Alfred William Rich currently in production.