Arundel, West Sussex

Ernest Waterlow captures the picturesque town of Arundel in West Sussex, likely drawn to its romantic medieval castle and tranquil riverside setting that made it a popular subject for late Victorian landscape painters. Waterlow was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1890 and became a full academician in 1903, eventually being knighted in 1902. Throughout his career, he produced admirable landscapes in both oil and watercolour, handled with what contemporaries described as 'grace and distinction.' His work balanced the naturalistic observation favored by the Royal Academy with a poetic sensibility that made him president of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1897.

Arundel, with its dramatic hilltop castle overlooking the River Arun and South Downs, offered exactly the kind of pastoral English scenery that Waterlow excelled at rendering. The town's medieval architecture and surrounding countryside provided rich material for an artist who had begun exhibiting in 1872 and maintained a steady output of landscape work until his death in Hampstead in 1919. While we don't know the exact date or medium of this particular work, it likely dates from the height of Waterlow's mature period when he was moving between oil and watercolour with equal facility, capturing the quiet dignity of the English landscape.