Shipping off the coast of Dieppe

Patrick Noon dates this watercolour to circa 1823-4. The young Bonington had arrived in France with his family in the autumn of 1817, settling first in Calais where he studied under the watercolour painter F.L.T. Francia (1772-1839). Following a move to Paris in 1819, he enrolled in the atelier of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1825), but by the summer of 1821 he had left Gros and thereafter he devoted himself to landscape painting. In the summer of 1824 Bonington and his friend Newton Fielding were in Dieppe, when he probably made our drawing (P. Noon, op.cit., p. 20).