Richard Parkes Bonington

Richard Parkes Bonington, born in Arnold, England, in 1802, was a prodigious talent whose brief life left an outsized impact on 19th-century art. His artistic journey began early, learning watercolor from his father and exhibiting at the Liverpool Academy by age eleven. A pivotal move to Calais, France, with his family in 1817 immersed him in French artistic circles. There, he studied under François Louis Thomas Francia, who introduced him to the English watercolor technique…