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| Richard Parkes Bonington Self Portrait ca. 1825-26 wash drawing British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Self Portrait (working at easel) ca. 1820-25 watercolor National Portrait Gallery, London |
"Richard Parkes Bonington was a productive and extremely talented watercolourist; born in England, he worked mainly in France and died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-six. Loved and well-respected by his peers and elders, after his death the accolades began modestly, but . . . 'swelled to extravagance as the century progressed, until the hard-working and unassuming young Anglo-French artist was transformed into a Romantic British hero.' . . . In the 1820s the borders between France and England were reopened, and artists, patrons and collectors criss-crossed the Channel creating, exhibiting, viewing and collecting paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints with passion. Bonington was part of this traffic and exchange, a British-born artist who studied his art in Paris and worked and exhibited with artists on both sides of the Channel. . . . Bonington died in September 1828 in London. Just two weeks later, on the 8th of October, a notice appeared in Le Globe describing him as 'tall and . . . strongly built, and there was nothing in him which could excite suspicions of consumption . . . His countenance was truly English, no other expression than that of melancholy gave it character.' The Romantic myth of melancholy was already leaving its mark on the way we now view his portraits, and makes one wonder whether the reputation for his 'well-known expression of frowning melancholy' was a contemporary or posthumous one."
– from The Intimate Portrait by Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, an exhibition catalogue from the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum (2008)
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| Richard Parkes Bonington after Jacopo da Empoli Figures from Uffizi painting, St Ivo, Protector of Widows and Orphans 1826 watercolour British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Quentin Durward and the disguised Louis XI (Scene from Walter-Scott's novel) ca. 1825-26 watercolour Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Two draped figures over the Monument of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, Westminster Abbey 1825 watercolour British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Venetian Scene ca. 1828 watercolor Wallace Collection, London |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Le Retour (man in armor escorting lady, with two pages) ca. 1826 wash drawing (print-study for lithograph) British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Man and Woman in Landscape (Faust and Marguerite, after Goethe) ca. 1826-27 wash drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Half-length of bearded man in historical dress before 1828 wash drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Study of man with legs crossed ca. 1826 drawing British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington after Anthony van Dyck Costume study ca. 1827-28 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Woman introducing man to another woman (study for Twelfth Night illustration) 1827 wash drawing British Museum |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Three Parrots ca. 1820-24 chalk drawing Tate Gallery |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Two Parrots ca. 1820-24 chalk drawing National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |