YCBA Collections Search

Charles Bentley belonged to the generation of watercolorists that emerged when the impact of Richard Parkes Bonington (cat. no. 73) was at its height. Bentley had trained as an engraver under Theodore Fielding, the younger brother of Anthony Vandyck Copley Fielding (cat. nos. 62-63). One of his early tasks was to reproduce Bonington's watercolors as engravings, a task he shared with his fellow pupil William Callow (cat. nos. 81-82). A short spell in Paris also helped to cement his appreciation of the latest Anglo-French style of watercolor based on the values of "color and effect."
Although Bentley occasionally painted pure landscapes of architectural subjects, he worked chiefly on coastal or marine views, so that one critic in 1848 could note that "Bentley still distinguishes himself with his excellent sea-pieces." Callow recalled a boating trip he made with Bentley in 1837, when the pair sailed around the Isle of Wight, both making "numerous studies of marine subjects." This watercolor of a three-masted naval vessel represents a "first rate." the largest ship in the British fleet, and was probably sketched on the Medway or the Solent. Bentley borrowed Bonington's method of rendering skies in sweeping dilute washes as well as the latter's tendency to scrape out the paper's surface to suggest the white foam of the waves and the bright white canvas of the jib at the ship's prow. Maximum contrast is provided by the russet sails of a passing yacht, dwarfed by the vast black-and-white hull of the man-o-war.
Bentley was elected a full member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1844 and showed more than two hundred works in its exhibitions over a twenty-year period. Despite this prolific output, he was never comfortably off. As Samuel Redgrave noted, "In the hands of picture dealers, he was uncertain in his transactions, and always poor." By a cruel irony for a painter of the sea, Bentley's life was ended by a fatal glass of water, making him the victim of the cholera outbreak in 1854 that took the lives of more than ten thousand Londoners. It was this infamous epidemic that led Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), a pioneer of modern epidemiology, to prove that cholera was a water-borne disease and fueled the effort to improve London's woefully inadequate sanitation system.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 182, no. 80