Day, William (1764-1807)

1789

William Day visited Derbyshire in 1789 when he toured the County with the artist John Webber (1751-1793). Day was a geologist and amateur artist who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1782 to 1801. Many watercolours survive from Day's 1789 tour.

Unlike Dovedale, few artists made it to the Manifold Valley. This watercolour shows Thor’s Cave, a fissure 80 meters high in the limestone. The cave lies around a mile south of Wetton Mill, a spot that featured in the engraving ‘A Prospect of the River Manyfold at Wetton Mill’, after Thomas Smith of Derby and first published in 1743.

Additional information

• Medium: Watercolour
• Institution: Buxton Museum and Art Gallery
• Dimensions: 695 x 565mm
• Accession number: DERSB : 2013.13
• Acknowledgements: William Hauptman, 'Captain Cook’s Painter: John Webber 1751-1793' (1996), 196
• Works in other collections:
  • A Singular Rock in Dove-Dale named the Pickerell (National Gallery of Art, B1990.18.1)
  • Renard's Hole, Dovedale, Derbyshire (Yale Center for British Art, B1975.4.1495)

Location

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