Women Drying Selves by Pond

John William Taverner · 1740/50

Medium

Watercolor and gouache, over traces of graphite, on tan laid paper, laid down on tan laid paper

Original size

31.7 × 41.6 cm (12 1/2 × 16 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Bathed in the soft, unhurried light of the mid-eighteenth century, this intimate scene of women at a pond carries the quiet dignity of everyday life elevated into art. John William Taverner was a gentleman amateur in the truest sense — better known in his own time as a composer and musician than as a visual artist, which lends his surviving works an appealing spontaneity free from professional conventions. Working in watercolor and gouache over a graphite underdrawing on tan laid paper, he built up form with layered washes and opaque highlights, a technique that gives his figures a warm solidity while the landscape around them breathes and recedes naturally. The tan ground of the paper does much of the work, acting as a mid-tone that unifies the scene and gives the whole composition its characteristic warmth. Because Taverner painted for his own pleasure rather than for commission or exhibition, pieces like this one are rare, which is part of what makes the Art Institute of Chicago's holding so quietly significant. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Taverner's delicate tonal range and the intimacy of his draughtsmanship onto canvas, preserving the mood and compositional balance of the original in a medium built to last.