Artwork
Sutherland Album
Sutherland Album is a watercolor work on paper by the Romanticist artist Henry William Bunbury. It is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
About this work
Overview
The Sutherland Album is a bound collection of water‑colour sketches, prints and handwritten literary excerpts. Functioning as a 18th‑century commonplace book, it gathers visual and textual material that the contributors deemed worthy of preservation, creating a personal archive of family and social connections.
Subject & Meaning
The pages feature works by several amateur artists linked through kinship, including Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, her nieces Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Rutland, and Caroline Howard, Lady Cawdor, as well as relatives such as the Countess of Harewood and Lady Caroline Georgiana Howard. Poems and letters echo these relationships, for instance a verse mourning the Duchess of Rutland and a tribute to Lady Mary Howard titled “The Rose of Castle Howard.”
Technique & Style
All visual items are executed in watercolour, ranging from delicate portrait sketches to landscape studies like the drawing of Castle Howard. The album also incorporates printed reproductions, demonstrating the mixed media approach typical of personal scrapbooks of the period.
History & Provenance
The compilation’s origin remains uncertain, though the front cover bears the signature “M Rutland,” suggesting involvement by a member of the Rutland family. The rear page depicts Belvoir Castle, the ancestral seat of the Earls of Rutland, reinforcing the album’s connection to that lineage.
Context
Commonplace books were popular among the British aristocracy in the late 1700s as venues for recording artistic practice, literary taste, and familial events. The Sutherland Album reflects this tradition, intertwining the creative pursuits of aristocratic amateurs with the social rituals of memorialising births, deaths and marriages.
Artist & collection
Artist
Henry William Bunbury (1 July 1750 – 7 May 1811) was an English caricaturist. The second son of Sir William Bunbury, 5th Baronet (see Bunbury baronets), of Mildenhall, Suffolk, he came of an old Norman family. He was…
