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At Seaton Cottage On The Don, Aberdeen
At Seaton Cottage On The Don, Aberdeen

At Seaton Cottage On The Don, Aberdeen

Artist (Aberdeen, Scotland, 1841 - 1913)
Mediumoil on paper mounted on card
ClassificationsPaintings And Drawings
DimensionsHeight: 23.6 cm, Width: 38.3 cm
Card: 24.3 x 39cm
AcquisitionPurchased in 1985 with assistance from the National Fund for Acquisitions.
CopyrightOut of copyright - CC0
LocationView by Appointment - Aberdeen Treasure Hub
Object numberABDAG007360
About MeEarly in 1869 Reid spent time in Paris with Israels' pupil David Artz. He wrote to White:

He is painting several little pictures just now - one of them - two children watching a lot of washing bleaching on an open common - stones laid out on the corners to keep them from blowing away - is particularly fine - just too like Israels if anything.

On his return Reid painted this small oil sketch of two children, "lad and lass" bleaching washing on grass. Reid depicts the children on White's land (they may well be two of his children, probably Aitchy and John Hermann) with the distinctive spires of St Machar's Cathedral behind. The intimate grouping of the two figures, male and female, and the way in which they have left off their work in order to contemplate something else, also recalls Millet's L'Angélus of 1859 (Paris, Musée du Louvre), of which he must certainly have been aware. The sketch was to provide the basis for a figure group in one of Reid's most important landscape paintings, Montrose of 1888.

More About Me

The girl, boy and drying laundry dominate this picture. They reappear in Reid's "Montrose" (also in Aberdeen’s collection), but as tiny figures in an open landscape.