Patrick Connor in his foreword to his monograph on Rooker, 1984 wrote, ‘Rooker has something in common with Keats – the Keats who believed that poetry should be unobtrusive, “a thing which enters one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject”, who relished the precise, sensuous qualities of colour and texture in natural objects, rather than their metaphysical overtones; who unlike many of his contemporaries, found mountain scenery ultimately oppressive, and preferred the more fertile and domestic pastures of the southern counties. Rooker looked with affection at the familiar elements of the countryside. Keats’s lines ‘upon a little hill’ could stand as Rooker’s epitaph:
Linger awhile upon some bending planks
That lean against a streamlet’s rusty banks,
And watch intently Nature’s gentle doings…’
Rooker was an apprentice of Paul Sandby (1725-1809) and studied at the Royal Academy Schools and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1770. He exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy, showing 119 works between 1769, the year of its first exhibition and 1800, the year before his death. Towards the end of the 1770s he took up the post of scene-painter at the Haymarket Theatre, the legacy of which can be seen in his charming use of animals as ‘staffage’ for his watercolours, as demonstrated by his placement of horses and pigs in the present watercolour.
Unlike many of his contemporaries Rooker was not an adventurous traveller and remained in Britain, beginning his series of annual tours circa 1788, usually in late summer after he had completed his commitments for the Haymarket Theatre. Rooker’s diary for 1796 (British Museum) notes that he sketched Leiston Abbey, Suffolk from various angles on 6-8 September 1796. Other views of Leiston Abbey are at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museum, Brighton and the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester.