Back of the New Mills, Norwich. by John Crome, 1768-1821

John Crome, 1768-1821
Scroll down for information.
Click here to return to the list.

Back of the New Mills, Norwich.

Original etching in black ink. 1812. Signed and dated in the plate. From the first edition of 60 impressions. As completed by Crome in 1812 and before any rework of the plate. from the edition issued by Mrs Crome, 1834. Almost no impressions dating from 1812 are known.
Ref: Theobald - John Crome no 4, second state of three as completed and before retouching and before the added title.

Extremely fine silvery impression with a light plate ink tone. On off white laid india (chine appliqué) with a pale cream wove backing sheet, as first issued. Excellent condition. Very good margins. Sheet: 15 x 16 3/4ins. Plate: 8 7/8 x 11 7/8ins (226x302mm)

This item is sold.
Click here to enquire about this item.

John Crome's landscape compositions epitomize the whole essence of English landscape art at the moment of its greatest flowering at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Crome was also one of the very first English artists to consider etching as a major medium in his oeuvre, alongside painting and drawing.

John Crome was born in 1768 in Norwich, then not merely a prosperous provincial market town but also increasingly, through the wealth brought by farming, a centre of culture and standing. The rich local families had established fine houses with large libraries and collections of paintings. By the end of the eighteenth century Crome had become one of the most admired painters in the region. In 1803 he established the Norwich Society; a group of artists and collectors who met together to discuss and promote art.

The central inspiration of Crome's art was to capture the essence of nature, of natural 'un-composed' landscape. He was influenced by the Dutch seventeenth-century paintings which he saw in the great local collections, especially by Hobbema and Rysdael He also greatly admired the romantic elegance and feeling for light in the work of painters like Richard Wilson, but particularly the directness and realism in Gainsborough. The great revolution in Crome's art, in comparison to the eighteenth-century tradition, was his desire to express 'real nature, - light, weather, the complex growth of plants, the feeling of being in the open air in landscape. As such his work marks a point as revolutionary in English painting as does the work in France of Corot and the Barbizon artists such as Rousseau, Daubigny etc.

One of the unique elements in Crome's art was his interest in using etching as a creative medium. He saw Dutch landscape prints, and prints by Sandby and Gainsborough, and decided to use the special combinations of line and tone, the interplay of the ink on the plate and the paper, to express the flickering patterns of sunlight, the misty atmosphere of the low-lying Norfolk landscape, and the feeling of the open-air.

In his pure etchings Crome deliberately bit the plates very lightly so as to create a fine slivery, almost dancing, quality of line. This special quality of light is only to be found in the now very rare first issues of Crome's etchings as the plates were subsequently reworked and rebitten after his death in a mistaken desire to 'improve' them. Besides pure etchings he also drew a few compositions in the highly tonal and atmospheric medium of softground-etching which he had particularly admired in Gainsborough's prints.

Back of the New Mills, Norwich is one of Crome's most famous larger etchings in an extremely fine first issue impression. The composition can be compared to the oil of the same group of buildings by the river now in the collection of Norwich Castle Museum which is usually dated to c.1815.