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Despite the appeal of these small sketches, the market in the early nineteenth century called for large, finished watercolors. When Copley Fielding had shown a small view of Richmond Hill among similar-sized works in 1822, a critic called them "clever little drawings ... but they are too diminutive to deserve particular attention." In response to demand, Copley Fielding exhibited thousands of exhibition watercolors with the Society of Painters in Water-Colours over the course of his career. The Head of Loch Fyne, with Dindarra Castle typifies this kind of work, in which he began to rely on blending pure watercolor with gouache to achieve strong visual effects to make his exhibits stand out in the crowded exhibition room.

When Paul Sandby (cat. nos. 4-6) mapped the Scottish Highlands in the later 1740s, the region was viewed by Englander and Lowland Scot alike as barbarous wasteland. By the early nineteenth century, however, the Highlands had become the most popular tourist destination in Europe. As lan Grimble has put it, it was not so much Scotland that people craved, but "Walter Scott-land." Walter Scott's phenomenally successful series of Waverley novels had cast the Highlands as the site of unashamed, self-indulgent romance. Queen Victoria gave the royal imprimatur to Scottish touring by visiting the Highlands in 1842 and then buying the Balmoral estate as a private retreat in 1848. Copley Fielding toured extensively in the Highlands in order to please public taste, produc ing both finished watercolors for exhibition as well as illustrations of the Waverley novels as part of a col. laborative project with fellow landscape artists. The Head of Loch Fyne, with Dindarra Castle was exhibited with the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1852, where Copley Fielding asked ten guineas for it, plus over one pound for the frame and glass, indicating that it was made for display on the wall and not to be banished into a portfolio. Dindarra, however, is Copley Fielding's own phonetic spelling of Dunderave Castle, which sits at the head of Loch Fyne, and in the nineteenth century was also known by the name Dundaraw or, in Gaelic, Dunderauch. He provided a view of the castle from the loch for the book Scotland Delineated in a Series of Views (1854), but in this independent watercolor, it is the choppy surface of the sea loch that becomes the main focus. Ruskin waxed lyrical about Copley Fielding's ability to paint the sea but thought that by this stage in his career he had "lost the sense of greenness in water, and has verged more and more on the purple and black, with unhappy results." In this case, his sea tends towards mauve, with the crests of the waves rendered by scratching out to reveal the white paper beneath. The fishermen and their boats have been painted over in opaque gouache, while the distant mountains have been heavily sponged to suggest being enveloped in typical Highland mist. Despite Ruskin's doubts, the critics admired these slightly mannered performances. "By such examples of his skill," wrote one reviewer looking at his 1852 exhibits, "Mr Copley Fielding justifies the position he has so long and so worthily held as President of the Society."

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 146, no. 63