RICHARD ANSDELL (United Kingdom, 1815 - 1885)."A Spanish Goatherd (View of Granada from Sacromonte),

RICHARD ANSDELL (United Kingdom, 1815 - 1885).
"A Spanish Goatherd (View of Granada from Sacromonte), ca.1860.
Oil on canvas.
Unsigned.
Name and title engraved on the frame.
Size: 76,5 x 194 cm; 106 x 221 cm (frame).
Like so many English painters of his time, Richard Ansdell fell in love with southern Spain. He made repeated trips to Granada and portrayed it from multiple perspectives, above all from distant viewpoints that allow a distant view of the city but close to its people. All this is masterfully captured in this view of the Alhambra and, behind it, the bluish mountains of the Sierra Nevada, from one of the slopes of Sacromonte. In the foreground, as usual in the British painter's work, is a pair of gypsies with their flock. The skill of the drawing is balanced by the just the right quality of the luminous Andalusian tones. The shepherds' costumes, their whitewashed features, the cottony fur of the goats, etc., have been painstakingly depicted, while the panoramic view takes in the soft atmospheric mood.
An English painter specialising in genre and animal themes, Richard Ansdell began his training as an apprentice to W. C. Smith, a portrait painter from Chatham (Kent). At the end of this period he went to Holland as a poster painter. In 1836, on returning to England, he joined the Liverpool Academy, an institution of which he became director almost a decade later, in 1845. By 1840 Ansdell had already exhibited two paintings at the Royal Academy in London and produced the first of his major commissions, The Country Meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society at Bristol, a series of one hundred and twenty-five individual portraits. Between 1840 and 1885 he took part annually in the Royal Academy exhibition, showing a total of 140 paintings. He also exhibited thirty canvases at the British Institution. He owed his popularity to two paintings in particular: The Combat, depicting two stags fighting, and The Fight for the Standart at the Battle of Waterloo, a life-size depiction of Sergeant Ewart of the Scots Greys fighting for the French standard at the Battle of Waterloo. The latter painting is now in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle. In 1847 Ansdell left his native Liverpool and settled in Kensington. In 1861 he was made a fellow of the Royal Academy in London, and nine years later an academician of the same institution. His recognition was such, in fact, that he became one of the most successful Victorian painters in the genre known in the United Kingdom as "sporting art", which encompasses subjects such as equestrian and hunting scenes. Within this genre Ansdell collaborated on large canvases with contemporary painters such as Thomas Creswick and William Powell Frith, painting the animals in their landscapes. In 1861 he produced one of his masterpieces, The Hunted Slaves (International Slavery Museum). By then his works, already widely recognised, were disseminated through reproduction prints, which were sold not only in the United Kingdom but also in America. Ansdell became friends with the contemporary painter John Phillip, known for his battle scenes, whose work inspired the artist to produce a series of works along the same lines, including "The Death of Sir William Lambton at the Battle of Waterloo" (Preston, Harris Museum). In 1856 he travelled with Phillip to Spain, where he painted all kinds of genre scenes and picturesque landscapes. The following year Ansdell travelled to Spain again and painted works such as Feeding Goats in the Alhambra (also in the Harris Museum). His work can be found in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the Lytham St. Annes Art Collection, the Tate Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.