Thomas Shotter Boys
British, 1803 - 1874
English painter and printmaker. He was apprenticed on 4 February 1817 to George Cooke. 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.
By 1824 Boys was in Paris where he 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 18th 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, and from here, or from one of his English acquaintances employed by J. F. d’Ostervald (Taylor’s editor), Boys acquired skills in the medium in which his best-known work is executed. His Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen &c (see [not available online]), published by Charles Hullmandel in 1839, was by no means the first of its genre; but Boys’s volume and its successor, Original Views of London as it Is (1842), are among the most splendid of such albums. Large in format, bearing elaborate title-pages and comprising a sequence of townscapes, which are startling for their combination of the familiar with provocative vistas, these two volumes display a preoccupation with design and abstract form that belies the artist’s professed intention to surpass all previous endeavours (which he described as ‘damndest, lying, ill-got-up, money-getting clap-traps’) and to do ‘Paris as it is’.
Boys’s 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’s work in watercolour is often confused with that of his friend Bonington. They owned examples of each other’s work and painted together: Bonington’s Les Salinières, Trouville (1826; priv. col., see Roundell, p. 68) is painted from the same spot as Boys’s rendering of the same subject (priv. col., see Roundell, p. 68) and is inscribed, apparently in Boys’s hand: ‘Drawn for me by R. P. Bonington’. 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 rigorous attention to architectural mass and proportion than Bonington. His view of the Institut (1830; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.) is altogether more conventional and stable than Bonington’s. His later watercolour views of European capitals (e.g. Dresden; 1843; Birmingham, Mus. & A.G.) 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.
Marcia Pointon. "Boys, Thomas Shotter." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T010735 (accessed May 1, 2012).
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