The English painter Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828), a fresh and vivid artist in his own right, also served as the connection between French and English painting at a particularly important juncture in the history of art.

Richard Bonington was born on Dec. 25, 1802, at Arnold, near Nottingham, where his father, who was an amateur painter, was governor of Nottingham city jail. In 1817 or 1818 his father set up a lace factory in Calais, France, and trained Richard as a lace designer.

In Calais, Bonington took lessons from Louis Francia, who had been a close friend and associate of the English watercolorist Thomas Girtin; Francia passed on to Bonington the tradition of English watercolor painting at its peak. When his father sought to make him stop taking lessons from Francia, Bonington ran away to Paris. Francia had given him a letter of introduction to Eugène Delacroix, who mentioned in...