SPARKLING SEA
signed WILLIAM STOTT OF OLDHAM. lower left
pastel on paper
24 x 31.5cm; 9 1/2 x 12 1/2in
45.5 x 56cm; 18 x 2in (framed)

Property from a West London Collector

Provenance
Charles A. Jackson, Manchester (by December 1939)
Purchased from the above by the father of the present owner in the 1940s

The son of an Oldham mill owner, Stott studied under the influential French Academician Jean-Léon Gérôme and exhibited regularly at the annual Paris Salon. In France he focused on painting landscapes, working in oil, watercolour and pastel, pastel in particular being a medium appropriate to his atmospheric style, as in the present work. He spent time at the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing and in 1889 he was the subject of a one-man exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel. On returning to England, during the last decade of his life he painted more allegorical and classicizing subjects to appeal to the British market. In London he became friends with Whistler, but fell out with him over his painting of Whistler's mistress naked as Venus Born of the Sea Foam. From his mid-twenties Stott signed himself 'of Oldham' to distinguish himself from another Lancastrian son of a mill-owner, Edward Stott, and to assert his proud Oldham roots.