Thomas William Bowler (1812-1869)
Lion's Head and Sea Point from Green Point, Cape of Good Hope
oil on canvas
16 x 34in. (40.6 x 86.4cm.)
In no part of the world can the artist meet with finer scenery than that on our coast from Camps Bay to Sea Point , ...
T. W. Bowler

Bowler and his family moved from 3 Burg Street, Cape Town to Green Point in 1856. 'They appear to have stayed here for some months as in April 1857 he gave proceeds (£10) of a lottery of one of his pictures - Camps Bay - towards the costs of a melodium in the Green Point chapel. It is not irrelevant to mention here in passing that Bowler was a devout Christian.' (F. R. Bradlow, Thomas Bowler, His life and work, Cape Town, 1967, p.40).

For a watercolour of Green Point, probably taken a little further on towards Sea Point, past the present viewpoint, see Sotheby's/Stephan Welz, Cape Town, 23 Feb. 2010, lot 685 (Bradlow, no.501). See also lot 44 in this sale for another watercolour of the view looking back towards the Green Point Lighthouse. There are also two smaller canvases of Green Point subjects, 'Green Point Common', 1855 (Bradlow, no.154) and the view of Green Point taken a little further back on the road, with the lighthouse included, for which see Strauss & Co., 13 Oct. 2014, lot 462. This latter may be one of the two oils ('Green Point Lighthouse', and 'Table Bay from Blue Berg') exhibited by Bowler in the Fine Arts Exhibition in Cape Town in November 1852. 'Green Point Lighthouse' attracted favourable criticism from the Commercial Advertiser's art critic 'Mastic Varnish', who commented that 'Mr Bowler's foreground, as in fact all his foregrounds are, is very cleverly introduced.'

Here Bowler provides a particularly animated foreground, the diagonal of the road leading the viewer across the picture from left to right: in the left foreground, the wet paint carefully worked by Bowler with the pointed handle of his brush, he paints a clump of Arum lilies (indicating the spring) and a stand of agaves above, a coulisse past which we glimpse a distant house on the hillside below Lion's Head. A seated figure by the fence watches as his dog, something of a Bowler signature (and possibly Bowler's own dog), approaches a group of Cape Malays. Beyond, a single storey house and then what might be Sea Point cottage, home of the late C.F. Solomon (compare the same cottage seen in his watercolour 'Sea Point', Bradlow, no.374) and a flagstaff flying a red flag. To the right, and framed within the fence, a steamer rounds the dangerous waters off the point.

The present canvas shares the wide format he favoured for his oils (and for many of his panoramic watercolours and printed views). See for example 'Mouille Point Lighthouse, 1868', 15 x 30in. (Bradlow, no.99), 'View of Table Bay from Robben Island in 1851', 19 x 32in. (Bradlow, no.132). Not in Bradlow who recorded just nine extant oils by the artist in 1967, this is a previously unrecorded work by the artist, and one of his finest and most descriptive oils of Cape scenery.

Bowler landed at the Cape on 5 January 1834 as a servant to Thomas Maclear, the new Astronomer Royal. He left Maclear's service the following year and was employed as tutor to the children of the commandant on Robben Island in 1835, and Robben Island provided him, along with the beach at Blueberg, his favourite view of Table Mountain from across the bay. He would spend most of his life in the Cape, setting himself up as a 'drawing master and landscape painter' in the 1830s and going on to produce the largest body of topographical views (the vast majority in watercolour) taken in the Cape Colony through the middle years of the 19th century.

Please note this lot is the property of a consumer. See H1 of the Conditions of Sale.