Buckingham House, St James's Park
1790
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
About the artist
1790
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Buckingham House, St James's Park is a 1790 watercolor by Edward Dayes, a British Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
You see a calm lake in front of a grand building. The water reflects the sky. People stroll by on a path. Dayes was a top watercolor artist in the 1700s. He taught Thomas Girtin, another famous painter. His style used soft blue-grey washes first, then colors on top. Look for more works by Dayes at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Edward Dayes’s watercolour depicts Buckingham House in St James’s Park, rendered with the grey-blue washes and outlined in pen and ink typical of late 18th-century practice. The composition contrasts the grand architecture of the building with the animated figures in the foreground, a deliberate choice that distinguishes Dayes’s approach from contemporaries such as Thomas Rowlandson. The work reflects Dayes’s influence on later artists, including Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner, through his refined watercolour technique. The structure shown would later be transformed by John Nash in the…
Read the full account in the museum source.
