COLE, George Vicat (British, 1833-1893). A View of Richmond Hill, 1875

George Vicat Cole (British, 1833-1893)
A View of Richmond Hill, 1875
Oil on canvas
Monogrammed and dated lower left
55 3/4 x 90 in. (141.6 x 228.6 cm); 62 x 96 in. framed

Provenance:
Frost & Reed, Ltd., London
Private collection, acquired from the above in 1983

Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1875, no. 237
Literature: John Ruskin, Academy Notes, 1875; Illustrated London News, May 22, 1875, p. 487; Robert Chignel, The Life and Paintings of Vicat Cole, R.A., 1896, vol. I, pp. 114-119, illustrated p. 117

At nearly eight feet wide, A View of Richmond Hill is a monumental panorama of the prospect from Terrace Walk on Richmond Hill, exhibited by George Vicat Cole at the Royal Academy in 1875. The Academy catalogue printed lines from James Thomson's The Seasons beside the title - "What a goodly prospect spreads around / Of hills, and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires, / And glittering towns, and gilded streams" - the poem that had celebrated this stretch of the Thames for a century and a half.

Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner had both painted the view from Richmond Hill before Cole, and in 1902 the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act made it the only view in Britain protected by its own Act of Parliament. Cole sets the scene in golden autumn light: fashionably dressed figures stroll and rest along Terrace Walk beneath a canopy of turning leaves, an elegant woman with a parasol leaning at the railing in the foreground, while the Thames winds away through the Petersham meadows into the distance.

John Ruskin discussed the painting in his Academy Notes of 1875. He judged the passages beneath the trees "of distant and subdued light, in their well-studied perfection... about the most masterly things in landscape work in this exhibition," though he faulted the mistiness of the far distance and the white wake of the farthest boat. The painting was noticed in the Illustrated London News the same year and is recorded and illustrated in Robert Chignel's 1896 biography of the artist.

George Vicat Cole was born in Portsmouth in 1833, the son of the landscape painter George Cole, and had no formal training beyond his father's instruction; yet his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy from the age of twenty. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1870 and a full Royal Academician in 1880, and his Pool of London (1888) hangs at Tate Britain. The present painting was with Frost & Reed, London, and passed in 1983 into the private collection where it remained until 2025.