WILLIAM DAY (1764-1807)

William Day was an accomplished gentleman artist, perhaps rather unfairly assigned to the addenda of the chapter for amateur artists by Iolo Williams in his Early English Watercolours, 1952. Judy Egerton in her article in The Connoisseur, 1970, pp. 176-185 states that Day’s interests were Geology, Minerology and Painting – in that order. He also ‘formed one of the earliest private collections of minerals in England; and always took on his sketching tours a bag for specimens as well as a box of watercolours’. Day was in fact an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1782 to 1801 and a close associate of the Swiss artist John Webber, and his watercolours are stylistically similar with a light coloured palette. Day seems to have shared Webber’s interest in rocks and mountains and accompanied Webber on a visit to the Wye Valley in 1788 and pairs of views by the two artists exist, see Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in the Whitworth Art Gallery, 2003, p. 282, D.1900.12 & D.1970.77, which relate to two watercolours by Day which were acquired by Chepstow Museum in 2012. In 1789 they travelled together again on a tour of Derbyshire, and this view of the Manifold River can be added to other views of Matlock, Cromford, Dovedale and Castleton which were executed on this tour.