The Chapel of the Greyfriars Monastery, Winchester
Date:
between 1790 and 1795
Materials & Techniques:
Watercolor on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper
Dimensions:
Sheet: 9 x 11 1/8 inches (22.9 x 28.3 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1975.4.1718
Gallery Label:
Michael Rooker began his career as a pupil of Paul Sandby, who dubbed him "Michelangelo," a moniker he retained for the rest of his life. Sandby was being gently ironic, for Rooker's work was hardly Michelangelesque. Instead, Rooker perfected topographical views that conformed to the late eighteenth-century vogue for the picturesque, an aesthetic middle way between the sublime and the beautiful. Here the ruined monastery has the roughness of the sublime but none of its horror and the calm serenity of the beautiful without its cloying regularity. Gallery label for Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-06-09 - 2008-08-17)
