Lot 60: John James Chalon (British, 1778-1854) Ambelside looking east towards Wornfell

Ambelside looking east towards Wornfell
signed with initials and dated '1813' (lower right)
oil on canvas
93 x 123cm (36 5/8 x 48 7/16in).

John James Chalon was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He moved to England with his family when his father became professor of French language at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1789. Despite his father planning an entirely different career in business, both he and his brother Alfred Edward Chalon (1780–1860) chose to study at the Royal Academy schools.

It was at the Academy in 1800 that he exhibited his first oil painting; however it is his watercolours for which he is most well-known. In 1808 he was elected a member of the Society of Painters in Watercolours and he went on to exhibit regularly at the Old Watercolour Society and the British Institution until 1843. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1841.

A landscape and genre painter, he advocated the benefits of open-air sketching and became one of the founders in 1808, of the Society for the Study in Epic and Pastoral Design, later the Sketching Society. It was this practice which give both his oil and watercolour painting an element of freshness and vitality.