With The Fine Art Society, London, by June 1966;

where acquired by the present owner 

Possibly, L✃ondon, Old Water-Colour Society, 1841, no. 98, as 'Venice'

Holland was born in Staffordshire into a family of pottery designers and painters. In 1819 he moved to 🃏London where he began to paint landscapes and where he soon advertised himself as a drawing teacher. In 1831 he went to Paris, for his first trip aboard. Although Richard Parkes Bonington had died nearly three years before, Holland encountered his work and fell under its spell.

The present watercolor, which dates to 1841, is very ‘Boningtonesque’ in feel, in particular in Holland’s masterly use of delicate watercolor-washes to achieve a sense of light and air and in the way he has scumbled on thicker, drier pigments when he wanted to emphasize either weight or shadow. His use of scratching out, employed when indicating an intense highlight on a surface, is also sophisticated. This watercolor may have been the one he exhibited in London at the Old Water-Colour Society exhibition of 1841.¹

¹See H. Stokes, ‘James Holland’, Walkers Quarterly, vol. 23, London 1927, p. 43