Bone (Sir Muirhead)

, , 1929.
a delightful sketch on the Bosphorus showing the Rumeli Fortress on the right bank, opposite the Anatolian Fortress on the left, with a gulet, a traditional two-masted sailing boat, making its way between the two. The view point would suggest the artist was aboard a similar vessel at the time.

Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) was a Scottish etcher and watercolourist. He trained as an architect first, before starting evening classes at Glasgow School of Art. He later settled in London and, in 1916, became the first officially appointed British war artist. He was to perform a similar official arts role during the Second World War, but in the interim he had taken the opportunity to travel extensively, including to Turkey. Companion drawings to this one can be seen in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and in the Detroit Institute of Arts. But two drypoint etchings, a view of Constantinople in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and a view of the Mosque of Suleiman in the Princeton University Art Museum, are based on sketches known to date to 1929,though the former wasn’t published until 1934, suggesting this sketch here also dates to 1929,.