Thomas Shotter Boys was apprenticed to the engraver George Cooke in 1817 before moving to Paris in the mid-1820s. His early training in engraving influenced his future career; his ability to draw a fine line, lay aquatint washes and hand-colour prints was an important factor in the creation of his particularly lucid style of watercolour landscapes and townscapes. At this time Cooke was engraving volumes of picturesque views by Turner and James Hakewell (1778–1843) as well as his own view of the Thames (1822); Boys went on to establish a reputation for his own lithographed volumes of picturesque tours.
Living in Paris, Boys met Richard Parkes Bonington, the Fielding brothers and William Callow, with whom he later shared a studio. British engravers had been in demand in Paris since the eighteenth century and in the early 1820s many were working on Baron Isidore-Justin-Severin Taylor’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Paris, 1820–75). Lithography became popular when Godefroy Engelmann opened his Imprimerie Lithographique in 1816. Boys acquired skills in the medium in which his best-known work is executed.
Boys’ work was well received but the craze for picturesque tour books was waning by 1842, and he travelled between Paris and London in search of markets. His highly refined watercolours exhibited at the New Water-Colour Society often sold for low prices. He was an associate there from 1840 and a full member from 1841. In 1846 he had to look for work as a drawing-master in Cheltenham and five years later was advertising his services as a tinter of architectural drawings. The failure in business and subsequent retirement of his cousin, the publisher Thomas Boys, in 1859 destroyed his hope of publishing a further album, Remains of Old England, which would presumably have been modelled on Baron Taylor’s Voyages.
Boys’ work in watercolour is often confused with that of his friend Bonington. They owned examples of each other’s work and painted together - virtually all the celebrated views of Paris by Bonington were also rendered by Boys, for example the Institut, the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal. Boys invariably had a crisper touch and a more rigourous attention to architectural mass and proportion than Bonington. His view of the Institut (1830; New Haven, CT, Yale Centre For British Art) is altogether more conventional and stable than Bonington’s. His later watercolour views of European capitals (e.g. Dresden; 1843; Birmingham, Museum & Art Gallery) make use of the camera obscura and are somewhat static, with elaborate surface detail. However, Boys was one of the most sophisticated and design-conscious artists of the Anglo-French picturesque movement.
Collections
Thomas Shotter Boys is represented in the following collections: Tate Gallery, London; Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts; Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; Museo Glauco Lombardi, Parma, Italy; Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, Italy, amongst others.
|