- Description
-
- Creator
- Frances Giffard
- Title(s)
-
- Chapel Hill from Old Woods Hill
- Date
- ca. 1791
- Medium
- Pen and ink, watercolour
- Dimensions
-
- image height 320mm,
- image width 470mm
- Mount
- on a contemporary mount
- Inscription
-
- sheet, recto
- signed and dated “1791”
- Inscription
-
- artist's mount, verso
- “Chapel Hill from Old Woods Hill”
- Object Type
- Watercolour
-
- Catalogue Number
- FT882
- Description Sources
- Museum records (image)
Provenance
Untraced until acquired before 1998 by the present owner, Torre Abbey.
- Associated People & Organisations
- Torre Abbey, Torquay, Torbay, Devon
- Bibliography
- Leslie Retallick, Torre Abbey Historic House and Gallery: Catalogue of the Art Collections, Torbay Council Education Services Directorate: Torbay, 1998, p. 8
Footnotes
- 1 Retallick 1998, p.8.
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Comment
Frances Giffard, a member of an ancient Devon family, was a frequent visitor to Torre Abbey, the seat of George Cary (1731–1805), and attended Easter mass there in 1791.1 The hilltop building is the medieval St Michael’s Chapel, north of the old village of Tormohum, itself just north of the Torre Abbey estate, which is obscured in the drawing by the hill.
Towne made a drawing for George Cary in 1779 (FT146), and if Giffard’s work is—as it seems to be—a copy after a lost drawing by Towne datable to the late 1780s, it may be that Towne won commissions from the Cary family during that later period too.
The composition follows a formula also used in an Exe estuary watercolour (FT901).