Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding

Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787–1855), President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours from 1831 until his death, a gold medallist at the Paris Salon of 1824, and the master of John Ruskin. His views of Ceylon, like his celebrated Benares and the remainder of his foreign subjects, were executed entirely from the sketches and descriptions of others, for he never travelled abroad; his reputation was nonetheless such that his pictures of places he had never seen were eagerly acquired by a British public whose appetite for images of empire far exceeded the capacity of resident artists to satisfy.

Fielding was born at Sowerby, near Halifax, on 22 November 1787, and trained under John Varley, from whose studio much of the early English watercolour school descended. He entered the Old Water-Colour Society as an associate in 1810, became a full member in 1813, and held its presidency from 1831 until his death at Worthing on 3 March 1855. He worked at great volume and occasionally in oil, though his standing rested on watercolour, and he was valued above all for the moorland, downland and coastal subjects of southern England, the Sussex Downs and open sea pieces whose handling of light and distance his contemporaries prized. The gold medal awarded at the Paris Salon of 1824, which he shared with Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable, placed his watercolour before a European audience at the height of his powers.

The lessons Fielding gave the young John Ruskin left a lasting mark. In Praeterita Ruskin recalled being taught to wash colour smoothly in successive tints and to build cloud and rain through many repeated washes, a discipline he traced directly to Fielding’s teaching. His Ceylon subjects belong to the last category of his work, the foreign views assembled at second hand: painted in England from material supplied by others, they record less the island itself than the demand at home for its image, and they place Fielding among the studio artists who furnished the Victorian public with a Ceylon they, and he, had never seen.