1833
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany: On the Walls, Cologne is a 1833 by Samuel Prout, a Romanticism work, depicting Tower, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a crumbling old wall in Cologne, covered in scribbled chalk sketches—horses, faces, even a quick doodle of a building. Prout didn’t paint this from life. He copied graffiti he found on walls during his travels, turning fleeting marks into something permanent. The gray paper makes the white highlights pop, like sunlight hitting stone. If you like how he plays with light and shadow, look up the technique called *chiaroscuro*.
Prout was a landscape watercolorist, printmaker, and well-known teacher. Prout drew freely on the stone with a firm but crumbling line, ideally suited to the quaint, eroded architecture he loved to portray. Tone was obtained by printing on pale gray paper and then adding highlights by hand with white gouache. Topographical prints had been popular in England since the late 1900s and they increased awareness of the beauty of the British landscape. Such prints, as well as the writing of Jean Jacques Rousseau, inspired a love of nature. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1814, peaceful conditions…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Samuel Prout (; 17 September 1783 – 10 February 1852) was a British watercolourist, and one of the masters of watercolour architectural painting, who largely invented the genre of the grand steet scene in British…
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