LEE, Frederick Richard - b. 1798 Barnstable, d. 1879 Wellington, South Africa

English painter, son of Thomas Lee Snr. and brother of Thomas Lee Jnr. (both well-known architects). Frederick was enrolled as a student in the Royal Academy in 1818. He was elected as ARA in 1834. one of his paintings from this time is Bringing in the Stag (1830; Tate Gallery, London).

Lee was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1838. He is known to have produced 40 dated paintings over the next 30 years. In addition to the dated paintings, a further 50 paintings are known to exist for which no date has been identified, including Lake in a Park (Tate Gallery, London).

Lee was a prolific artist. His subject matters were clearly influenced by those which also intrigued John Constable and other contemporaries.

Some of Lee’s more notable paintings were a collaboration with Thomas Sidney Cooper and Sir Edwin Landseer, Lee painting the landscape and Cooper and Landseer adding the animals. Landscapes and pastoral scenes form the majority of his painting interest.

Scottish scenes figured prominently as subjects for Lee, but he also travelled extensively elsewhere in Britain and the continent. He also spent considerable time at Penshurst, Kent where a number of his paintings originate.

He retired in 1871 and died and was buried near Wellington in South Africa.

Le Pont du Gard

The present signed and dated painting depicts one of France’s greatest surviving feats of engineering which dates from the early Roman Empire. The Pont du Gard is a Roman aqueduct crossing the River Gardon near Nîmes in the south of France. Designed to carry water across the small Gardon river valley, it was part of an aqueduct, nearly 50 km long that brought water from the Fontaines d’Eure springs near Uzes to the Castellum in the Roman city of Nemausus (Nîmes).