An Artists View of the Wight in the 1790s

In 1791 four artists made a perilous crossing to the Island to undertake a memorable holiday, seeking inspiration and pleasure amidst bucolic beauty and spectacular coastal landscape. In their drawing and painting they pictured both a lost pre-industrial world and the very beginnings of the tourist revolution that has defined the Island ever since. An exhibition of seventeen watercolours by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) is now on display at the Guildhall, Newport and a limited edition of reproductions now available.

In the summer of 1791 Thomas Rowlandson boarded a ferry at Lymington bound for Yarmouth. With him were three friends and fellow artists, Henry Wigstead (1760-1832), with whom he had made an earlier painting tour of the Island in 1784, his brother in law Samuel Howitt (1756-1822) and possibly John Bannister.

Rowlandson was a well known London satirical artist, 35 years old, a lean bachelor with a taste for the pleasures of life. He had travelled widely in Britain and Europe. His incisive artwork makes him a kind of photojournalist of Georgian Britain.

In the 1790s the Tourist Revolution which defines modernity and industrialisation of the Isle of Wight had already begun. “Parties of Pleasure were frequently made to it” wrote J. Hassell in A Tour of the Isle of Wight published in 1790. The visitors enjoyed the ivy covered ruins of Carisbrooke Castle and the wild spectacular coastline.

Pictures of both subjects appear in the collection of 112 pictures by Rowlandson, Howitt and others made on different painting trips of the 1790s from which this exhibition is drawn.
Tourism was still in its infancy and still dangerous. Some of Rowlandsons pictures show the kind of vessel their ferry was, a small open decked sailing ship which was now blown off course by “very tempestuous” weather. “Landed at Shalfleet” shows Rowlandson and his three companions disembarking and looking worse for wear. The next picture (right) shows them relaxing in the happier surroundings of the New Inn, with drinks and smiling countenances, Rowlandson sketching.

In the next picture the travellers resume their broken journey in “Conveyance to Yarmouth”. If modern ferries are one advantage of modern tourism, roads are another. The rough cart in which the gentlemen are travelling is seen negotiating a track over a stream. For their dignity they have each been seated on a dining room chair on the back of the cart.

Yarmouth was the Island’s second official town but had shrunk in importance since the Middle Ages. It had a population of 350, about half that of the parishes of Shalfleet or Calbourne. However unlike the “rotten borough” of Newtown, tiny Yarmouth was still a real town. There were inns and tradesmen, a small garrison in the castle, fishermen and a market. Yarmouth was a natural point for the new tourists to hire trips to visit the spectacular western coast. Rowlandson’s view of Quay Street, (above) like that of the New Inn, despite the obvious differences is comfortingly familiar over two centuries on.

Upriver of Yarmouth lay the tiny hamlets of Freshwater and the scattered farms of Totland. Under 600 people lived west of the Yar. Rowlandson’s party painted marine and landscape views, the church, and the Cabin Inn at Freshwater Bay, a drinking haunt of Rowlandson’s friend, the artist George Morland.

Southeast of Freshwater and south of the roadless “ridge of mountains running through the middle of the Island” the ‘Back of the Wight’ was even more remote and the only part of the Island not to be recorded in the collection. About 1,500 people lived in the five parishes between Brook and Chale, making a living from mixed farming, wreck salvage and smuggling.

From Yarmouth our intrepid travellers made the journey to Newport on tracks over a succession of fields, stopping to open and close over fifty gates.

Newport was the Islands capital and focus of the Island’s population. Almost 6,000 of about 22,000 Islanders lived in the town and the parish of Carisbrooke. Newport had already developed a role we are are familiar with today.

In 1794 Henry Wyndham described it as “handsome and well built... the shops are numerous and as superbly stocked as they are in most of the English cities”.

But Newport was much more, a thriving tidal port, with a dozen watermills, workshops and bustling markets. One of these is shown (right) in Rowlandson’s view of the Old Town Hall from St Thomas’ with the traders stalls where the museum is now and soldiers from Parkhurst barracks chatting up local women in the square.

If Newport had one serious rival it was its “suburb” of Cowes and East Cowes. Newport’s town corporation controlled the harbour but on land the twin towns of the Medina estuary were rapidly developing. The parishes of Northwood and Whippingham which included the new settlements had a population of 3,800 by the 1790s. Hassell describes the narrow crowded streets as “indifferently built”, but its inhabitants as “genteel and polite without being troublesomely ceremonious”
The new twin towns of Cowes made the easiest landing point on the Island from Southampton and one of the pictures (below) shows passengers landing at the Vine Inn at Cowes. Two of Howitt’s pictures in the collection but not in this exhibition show infant Cowes already grappling with its future identity. In one picture are bathing machines reflecting the town becoming a fashionable resort.

Another shows a shipbuilding yard where J.S. Whites would later develop.
The whole north-east coast of the Wight could not help but be affected by the development of Portsmouth and the Spithead as the greatest naval port and anchorage in the world offering shelter to all vessels using the Channel, the greatest trading highway of the world. The Island supplied food, drink and ships spares and naval officers built gothic villas on the Island’s coast. By the end of the century 1,500 people lived in Brading and St Helens and another 2,000 in the parish of Newchurch which included the villages of Lower and Upper Ryde.

Rowlandson’s painting of Brading is one the earliest known and Howitt’s paintings of Lower Ryde capture the wooden beginnings of the modern town.

Rowlandson and his companions also travelled south, probably now on horseback, through the rich agrarian parishes of Arreton and Godshill which mustered 2,500 parishioners. Beyond the sheep runs on the surrounding chalk downs the spectacular eastern and southern coastline was almost totally deserted. There were barely 600 people living between Culver Cliff and St Catherines.

Where now stand the three towns of Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, there was just a fort, a smattering of longshoremen’s cottages and the tiny village of Shanklin, “lost to the sight in a perfect wilderness” its church standing in the middle of the yard of Mr Jolliffe’s Shanklin Farm, serenaded by “an uncommon number of singing birds”.

Through this picturesque idyll the party rode from inn to substantial inn, showing that the tourist trade was already well established. Shanklin Chine had steps and a stone arch. The fisherman’s cottage was so often used for the purpose that it became known as “Honeymoon Cottage”.

Sometime between 1830 and 1837, 22 pictures by Howitt, 53 by Rowlandson and 23 by their companions were bound by William IV’s bookbinder into two volumes which became the property of the Marquess of Bath. In 2002 they were purchased by the IW Council with help from the Heritage Lottery and Art funds. In 2004 details of some of the pictures were shown at Shanklin Chine Heritage Centre.

The current exhibition of 17 of Rowlandson’s watercolours lasts to March 24th. The IW Council has also authorised specialists Maritime Prints and Originals to make a limited edition of just 350 of each of the pictures on show. Faithfully reproduced and beautifully mounted they are are now available (see advertisement below or thomasrowlandson.com).