[Spine title]. C.W. Fothergill Watercolours. [An extraordinary Victorian artist’s album filled with 55 original watercolour paintings and pencil sketches capturing the closing decade of 19th-Century Great Britain, including nautical & maritime themes, historic architectural buildings, landscapes, and more].

[Cranbrook, Kent & London: Lt. Col. Charles William Fothergill, R.A., 1887-1897]. Oblong 4to. 10 x 8 x 1.75 in. [2], 52, [1] leaves, numbered in pencil manuscript, including manuscript index leaf listing all the paintings within, excluding the frontisp. & rear pastedown watercolour paintings. With 55 paintings, with most sized from 5.5 x 4.5 in. up to 7.5 x 5.5 in., all w/ neatly penciled manuscript borders, most w/ annotations below, and nearly all paintings signed, many dated, 2 smaller are mounted on leaf 25 of the Scottish Highlands, most are watercolours with graphite underdrawing, a few are graphite sketches, w/ watercolour highlights, and elements added. Contemporary black half-diced-calf over gray-brown pebbled cloth, white silk moire endpapers, gilt ruling & lettering on spines (minor scuffing, edgewear, minor wear to corners), still an exceptionally bright exemplar. This marvelous album of original Victorian watercolours by retired Royal Marine Artillery officer, and longtime art instructor at Sandhurst elicit a nearly pastoral sense, including nautical themes, historic homes, inns, castles, and landscapes. The album opens with a vivid watercolour painting of a decidedly bucolic Virginia Water, possibly on the present-day Wentworth Estate with small boat amidst the water and trees, and closes with a fine painting of steamship sailing past yachts tacking in the background and storm clouds above. The album begins with Milton’s Cottage at Chalfont St. Giles where he completed Paradise Lost, and conceived Paradise Regained during the Plague years, and was a popular subject of other British painters, including Donald Macleod, Joseph Webb, and Charles Leaver. Other paintings include those of the Martello Tower at Seaford, one of the 103 towers built from Aldeburgh to Suffolk on the coast of Eastbourne in 1803 when Napoleon threatened to cross the channel; Brook Place at Chobham, a Dutch-gabled home built by William Beauchamp in 1656 after the original Elizabethan home had burned down in 1648; the HMS Hannibal at Portsmouth, warship laid down in 1840, utilized screw propulsion, and a 91 gunner commanded in the Crimean War by John Charles Dalrymple Hay -- at the time of this painting it was serving to alleviate overcrowding in the training ship Boscawan. Other nautical themes include No. 8 a view of ships in Portsmouth Harbour with the dockside in the background; No. 9 a sidewheeler steamship with lighters and rock nearby in the Medway off Gravesend; No. 11, a view of tall ships under sail at Fowey off Cornwall, and even No. 47, a nicely rendered painting of boats sailing on the Medway with sails in colour, and faint outlines of Rochester Castle and nearby Cathedral in the background.Fothergill also painted landscapes such as No. 14, Hindhead HIll, Surrey, on the main Portsmouth to London road, 13 miles southwest of Guildford, with Gibbet Hill rising in the background above the surrounding Heath; three beautiful landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, No. 48 Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland in 1897, which would later be purchased in 1911 by Sir Fitzroy Donald Maclean and restored; Beeston Castle above the Cheshire Plain; No. 24, Franks Hall in Horton Kirby, Kent, Framingham after the property had passed to Vavasour Earle, and in its original state; No. 26, the Mitcham Common Windmill, one of the few houses ever built on the common and operated as windmill until 1863 when two sails were destroyed as depicted here -- it was later dismantled down to the base in 1905. Other historic places such as the Old White Horse Inn in Edinburgh, where during the 1639 rebellion against King Charles I, the Presbyterian ministers urged a mob to lay siege preventing the noblemen from escaping except for the Marquis of Montrose. This painting reflects its dilapidated Victorian state, rather than the restored 1960’s version visible today. Fothergill (1839-1903) remains an enigma to many of the typical art references for British painters, and exhibited three watercolours at the Society of British Artists between 1880 and 1884, including “The Mouth of the Dart,” and “Hulks in Portsmouth Harbour” (possibly an alternate version of Nos. 17 & 18 in the present album), and later exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy in 1900. He received his first commission in the Royal Marine Artillery in 1855, was appointed to serve as instructor in Military Drawing & Surveying at the Royal Military College “Cadets’ College” at Sandhurst in 1868 under command of Adjutant Major W. Patterson, and continued to teach there until his retirement. His distinctive signature closely mirrors that of his 1872 marriage certificate to Edith Kathleen Maclean in 1872, daughter of Royal Military College Surgeon Dr. Andrew Maclean (1812-1902), and by the 1891 census the couple parented 7 children and a niece in their busy household in Hammersmith, London. See: New Annual Army List, Militia List and Indian Civil Service List, 1875, p. 92; Hart, New Annual Army List, Hart’s Anual for 1875, Vol. 36, pp. 115, 126; Maritime and Scientific Models, Instruments & Art, 10th May 2016, Charles Miller, Ltd., No. 48.