This month we are featuring a striking Norwegian landscape painting in watercolour and body colour by British artist Edgar E West (1827 - 1913).

About the artist

Edgar E West was born in Bristol in 1827 and moved to London as an adult. He was particularly known for painting landscapes in Norway, Cornwall and Normandy.

He came from an artistic background as his father was William West (1801-1861), an artist and astronomer, known for creating an observatory on Clifton Down in Bristol and excavating a tunnel from his observatory to the Avon Gorge. William West was also renowned for painting Norwegian landscapes, so it seems logical that Edgar would follow in his father’s footsteps, perhaps travelling with him to Norway to paint.

Romantic vistas were very popular in Victorian art and the additional fascination of a distant land such as Norway would have added an extra cachet for art buyers.

In 1881 one of Edgar's paintings was included in the Royal Academy Summer exhibition in London and he exhibited his artworks in different parts of the United Kingdom – including several exhibitions in Belfast. In 1887 the Northern Irish newspaper, the Northern Whig, advertised “Norwegian Scenery - Special Exhibition of 18 Grand works by E Edgar West, Rodman’s Art Gallery” in Belfast. In 1887 he also exhibited his ‘Norwegian Scenery Exhibition’ in Leeds and one of his works featured in an exhibition of watercolours at the Royal Scottish Academy.

Later in life, records show that he spent some time living in Cornwall in the 1890s (in 1897 he was recorded in Kelly’s directory as residing with his son in St Mawes, perhaps on a temporary basis to do some painting?).

His wife died in the early 1900s and his final few years seem to have been spent living on the southern coast on the border between Dorset and Hampshire. In the 1911 census he was described as a ‘widower’, living on the eastern edge of Bournemouth. He died in Christchurch Hampshire in 1913.

Edgar E West's daughter Florence was married to William Humphries (sometimes called William Humphris), an artist in his own right, who was active in Cornwall in the late 19th century. The famous artist Henry Scott Tuke painted portraits of both William and Florence. The portrait of Florence Humphris is part of the Tate collection.

Restoring the Painting

Painting style and themes

Edgar E West clearly enjoyed painting water – lakes, rivers, the sea, waterfalls and water crashing on rocks. This picture, of Romsdal Norway, is no exception - still, reflective water dominates the foreground.

He used a variety of paint finishes for the execution of his paintings, including watercolour, body colour and oil paints.

This painting appears to include both watercolour and body colour, enabling him to achieve more concentrated blocks of colour than pure watercolour. Body colour is made when watercolours are mixed with white pigment, creating a more intense colour.

A Critique of Edgar E West's painting dated 1887

Edgar West's Norwegian Scenery exhibition in Belfast was praised profusely in a review in the Belfast News-Letter, of 3 June 1887:

“There is at present on view in Messrs. Rodman & Co’s Gallery, Donegal Place, a series of water-colour drawings illustrative of Norwegian scenery, executed by Mr. E. Edgar West, an artist who has for several years past been well known as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy as well as at the various Water-Colour Societies in London.

Anyone who bestows even a casual amount of attention upon these eighteen works will have no difficulty in understanding how Mr. West has attained to the position which he at present occupies in the world of art. With the exception of some of the finest of the Alpine studies of Elijah Walton we have never seen drawings of mountain scenery which are worthy of being placed along-side the present series. The vivid force possessed by each is absolutely astonishing. Only the most daring painter would attempt the reproduction of such striking scenes - scenes imbued with rich colour such as is not to be found even in the most gorgeous Italian landscape.

The long twilights of the far north, among the Luffoden Islands and on the coast from Tromsoe to the North Cape, are infinitely more productive of rich effects than the fierce brief red twilights of the sub-tropical countries. Of this fact Mr. West has shown himself to be well aware, and he has ventured further than any living artist in its illustrating. The splendid masses of atmospheric purple that clothe the bold cliffs and dwindle away into billows of the brightest blue arc to be found in almost every one of his drawings.

But though vigorous in his treatment of these masses of colour Mr. West is never vague in his details. His rock fronts are perfectly defined against their sombre backgrounds, and the delicate green herbage, and, perhaps, the straggling foliage of a stunted tree are dealt with as appreciatively as though they were the chief elements in the foreground of a picture of an English river scene. The striking effect of every drawing in the series is due to the perfect mastery of the artist over the details of the scenes. Therefore, there is nothing that could be termed bizarre in his masses of heavy colour, or in the bright blue half-way up to the valley slopes.

But, powerful though Mr. West's colouring maybe, his greatest skill must certainly be said to lie in his representation of water in motion. The waterfalls and cataracts to be found in many of the pictures are magnificent. Not merely is the full, mighty volume of falling water shown with splendid effect, but the delicate sweep of the innumerable eddies is reproduced with equal accuracy. The water that slips over the smooth stones from the general rolling flood has not escaped the eye of the artist, and the result is to give a fresh charm of subtle olive green colour to each picture. Such effective blending of boldness and breath, of delicacy and detail, we have rarely seen in works of this class.

As an exponent of the scenery of Norway in Summer, where the day never comes to an end, even in the depth of the furthest valley, where the dark blue waters of the land-locked fjord are as unchanged at noon as they are in the twilight of midnight, where the long ranks of the mountain pines seem to entangle the crimson floods of sunset light that scarcely fade into purple before the shell-pink haze of morning moves up the valley, where the white ridges of those hills that always seem distant remain for ever unchanged beneath an ever-changing sky, as an interpreter of such scenes as these Mr. Edgar West must be regarded as occupying a unique position.”

Acknowledgements and references

British Newspaper Archive:

St James's Gazette - 10 June 1882
Belfast News-Letter - 3 June 1887
Northern Whig - 7 June 1887
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer – 8 October 1887

UK Census 1871, 1901, 1911
British Births, Marriages & Deaths records
Kelly’s directory 1897 – Cornwall

Everett Fine Art