Sidney Richard Percy:
Cloud-shine

We talk of sunshine and moonshine but not of cloud-shine which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights. Alice Meynell

Sidney Richard Percy (1822-1886) was arguably the most gifted of the celebrated Williams Family of Victorian painters who – due to the fact that they all, at one time or another, lived and worked in Barnes in South West London – were collectively known as The Barnes School. To distinguish himself from his famous artist father Edward Williams (1781-1855) and other members of his family Sidney followed the example of his elder brothers Henry John Boddington (1811-1865) and Arthur Gilbert (1819-1895) and dropped the ‘Williams’ from his name. By the age of 20 he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Suffolk Street Gallery using his first and middle names only.

‘Llyn Idwal, North Wales’ by Sidney Richard Percy

Sidney Richard Percy wasn’t a follower of J.M.W. Turner like James Baker Pyne or of John Constable like Frederick William Watts or of the Dutch Golden Age painters like John Crome and James Stark. He and his siblings were influenced by their father and each other more than anyone else and the work of all six brothers consequently shares much in common. But for their spectacular recreations of dramatic cloud formations the landscapes of Sidney Richard Percy – which invariably feature grazing cattle and one or two human figures set against a mountainous background beneath fulminating skies – stand alone. Of course, plenty of other important topographical painters of the period knew how to deliver dramatic weather on canvas but Percy was so preoccupied by meteorological phenomena he might be described as a painter of ‘skyscapes’ as much as landscapes. Few other English artists of the period were so adept at evoking the effects of sunlight upon rock, earth, crops, cattle and (typically) through trees.

It was, however, as a painter of secondary light – light from a primary source such as the sun or moon reflected by a non-luminous substance such as water – that Percy excelled. Although the majority of his paintings feature views of light on water (typically Scottish lochs, Welsh llyns, or English lakes) it is in the sky above that his gifts as an artist are best illustrated. By and large, most of the action in any painting by Sidney Percy takes place in the sky where his effulgent cumulonimbus really steal the show. When painted by Sidney Percy, clouds possess what TV property programmes like to describe as the “wow factor”. The great English poet and critic Alice Meynell (coincidently from Barnes in South West London) might have been looking at a landscape by Percy when she wrote;

“The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their own local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced before the all-important mood of the cloud.”

‘Near Moel Siabod, North Wales’ by Sidney Richard Percy 

Sidney Richard Percy’s reputation as one of Britain’s most popular and successful landscape painters was ensured after the Royal Academy exhibition in 1854 when Prince Albert purchased ‘A View of Llyn Dulyn, North Wales’ for Queen Victoria. When Percy’s work also garnered critical praise and the attention of the French public at the Salon des Artistes his international status was similarly secured. As the Gazette des Beaux-Arts said;

“We are happy that Mr. Percy has today deserted Trafalgar Square for the Champs-Elysées.”

Although, like so many English landscape painters of the day, Percy was in the business of portraying the romantic past of the British countryside he was also keen to embrace the future. In the 1850’s it would have been impossible to find a painter who did not have an opinion on the rapidly increasing popularity of photography. Some dismissed it as mere mechanical reproduction, others fretted that it would soon put them out of a job, and many, like Sidney Percy, recognised its great potential as a tool and were keen to use photographic images to assist with preparatory sketches. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has in its collection albumen prints of photographs taken by Percy of young women dressed in regional costume that he took in his back garden in South West London.

A photograph taken by Sidney Percy of a figure in rural dress later used in his 1865 Royal Academy painting ‘Cornfields by the Coast’, previous sold by Academy Fine Paintings 

Census records of the period show that Percy’s success had by this time enabled the family to employ domestic servants and it is the images of these same figures, seen in the photos above and below posing as labourers and milkmaids, that would provide the staffage in various paintings by the artist.

Another of Sidney Percy’s preparitory photos of figures later to appear in ‘A Rest at the Roadside’ in 1861

The one or two rustics that routinely populate many Victorian landscapes are hastily drawn and feel perfunctory, but those in the paintings of Percy are always well observed and at home in their surroundings. That said, these pictures were never about people, they were about places; as yet untamed lands beneath indomitable skies. The very point was to capture those remote regions of England, Scotland, and Wales, untouched by overpopulation and industrialisation, whose mountains and rivers had not yet been flattened and dammed. Like many of us today, the Victorians feared that in the march of progress the natural world was being trampled under foot. In his own way Sideny Richard Percy was doing his bit to preserve the wild landscape of Britain, if only for posterity in an oil painting. 

Between 1842 and 1886 Percy exhibited 73 paintings at the Royal Academy, 48 at the British Institution, 73 at the Suffolk Street Gallery of the Royal Society of British Artists, and a further 78 at various other principal venues. Today, works by Sidney Richard Percy are held in the collections of the Tate Britain in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal amongst many others. We always have fine examples of the artist’s work for sale that can be viewed at our Gallery page.

by Gavin Claxton

© Academy Fine Paintings Ltd 2022