PROVENANCE -

Joseph Chamberlain, MP (1836-1914)

His son Sir (Joseph) Austen Chamberlain, KG, MP (1863-1937).

With Thomas Agnew & Sons.

Christie’s, 21 June 1918, lot 97 (25 guineas to Mitchell).

Inherited by the present owners.

EXHIBITED -

Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, 1876, no. 111, as In the Channel Islands.

LITERATURE -

Birmingham Daily Post, 21 August 1876, p. 5 'Mr Brett is, of course, represented ... with a new and admirable work, painted for Mr Chamberlain, MP - a coast scene, with boats preparing to put off, in the early morning'.

Birmingham Daily Post, 28 August 1876, p. 5 'one of Mr Brett's very finest works, "In the Channel Islands" (111), in which rock, and sand, and sea are painted, as Mr Brett alone can render them'.

C. Payne, John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, New Haven and London, 2010, no. 773, as Icart Point, Guernsey.

In the late summer and autumn of 1874, the Brett family went to Guernsey for the annual ‘painting campaign’. The trip resulted in several smaller paintings exhibited that year, and in 1875, four or five larger, more ambitious pictures, including his seven foot wide Spires and Steeples of the Channel Islands set in Moulin Huet Bay (location untraced), and On the Coast of Guernsey, dated 1875 and inscribed 'from the cliffs over Moulin Huet' on the back, which is slightly smaller than this (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). The larger picture caught the attention of John Ruskin, who praised the 'extreme distance' captured by Brett as 'the best bit of sea and atmosphere in the rooms. The paint [is] ... laid on with extreme science in alterations of colour'. 

This painting, exhibited in 1876, is the last from his 1874 trip to Guernsey, a location that inspired several of Brett's best paintings. By now, Brett was at the outset of what he later described as his 'Heyday', when he was made Associate of the Royal Academy, where his pictures were regularly accepted for exhibition and sold for £1200 apiece.

Brett's love of geology led him to explore wilder shores, especially at low tide.  As an experienced sailor, Brett was better able to reach pristine, unknown parts of the British coast, where he found (as he said pithily) that 'sentiment in landscape is chiefly dependent on meteorology.' Man, if he appeared at all, was small in his landscapes; nature was master.