Landscapes by Thomas Baker feature regularly in auction sales and there have been some good examples recently. My father Robert Mulraine has added these to the online catalogue.

Baker made his living by painting pictures that appealed to the buying public. These three pictures, however, each represent something slightly different.

The river and meadows at Offchurchbury just outside Leamington Spa were a favourite subject. The Leam near Offchurchbury signed and dated 1857, oil on artist’s board, 18 x 25 cm is at Peter Francis Auction, Carmathen, 13th December 2023, lot 98, estimate £150–250.

Baker usually made landscape watercolour sketches from life and worked them up into finished oils in the studio. The small size and loose handling of this oil – more typical of his watercolours – might argue it was painted directly from the subject.

The back of the Winsor and Newton board is inscribed by Baker with the date and title of the picture. It even has the stamp from the shop in Leamington where he bought it, W. Enoch, Bookseller and Stationer. This support is a crucial document of Baker’s practice and suppliers. William Enoch, Bookseller and John Enoch, Bootmaker, both of Bath Street, Leamington are recorded in the diaries as buyers of Baker’s work between 1845 and 1861.

Most importantly the back of the board also shows the numbering which Baker inscribed on the back of the 901 works recorded in his diary, representing all but a handful of his known oil paintings. This is no.597, corresponding to this entry in his diaries (image courtesy of Birmingham Museums and Galleries).

Baker notes the millboard support and the ‘sunset effect’ in the painting. He also records that it was sold to ‘Mr O. Oakley’. The famous watercolourist Octavius Oakley, a friend and neighbour of Baker’s, painted his portrait in 1841.

Octavius Oakley (1800–1867), Portrait of Thomas Baker 1841, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Oakley bought a number of Baker’s paintings. He seems to have preferred loosely painted sketches with well-observed atmospherics. The Leam near Offchurchbury may have been too sketchy for the commercial public – Baker’s diary shows that it was unsold for almost two years – but it is very much ‘an artist’s picture’.

In the Ogwen Valley signed and dated 1861, watercolour on paper, 24 x 34 cm, 1818 Auctions, 17th December 2023, lot 1215, estimate £80–120, was most probably painted rapidly on the spot during a tour of Wales. Baker travelled round the country on sketching trips to gather the raw material for oils to be worked up later in his Leamington studio.

It shows his artistic response to landscape. In this scene it seems that the weather is coming on rapidly from the left, with cloud beginning to cover the mountains and sweeping into the valley. Travellers on the winding road take us into the view. A drawing like this has great appeal today as a picture you can feel, a snapshot of time and place in the tradition of Constable and Turner, the titans who shaped the art scene when Baker was first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1831. But in Baker’s time it may not have been intended for sale at all. It was probably part of his sketch archive that was be the source for oil paintings. Baker would often use sketches years later. For example, no.187 in Baker’s diary is a 1842 landscape of Holly-walk Lane in Leamington that Baker describes as painted ‘From a sketch made in 1833’.

The final picture of the three is a rare example of Baker copying the work of a contemporary. The Stile by Thomas Creswick RA (1811 – 1867), Baker’s fellow student at Vincent Barber’s Academy in Birmingham, is now in Tate Britain. It was exhibited at the British Institution in 1839 when it was bought by the collector Robert Vernon.

Baker’s painting is stylistically datable to the same date. He may have seen Creswick’s picture at exhibition, at the artist’s studio in London. Clearly, it was a subject that interested him as a painter and he produced this oil based on Creswick’s composition.

Baker’s painting, initialled T.B. is previously undocumented. It was sold at Rosebery’s Auctions, 22nd November 2023, lot 188, for £367 including premium. The two paintings illustrate the difference between Baker’s style and Creswick’s. Baker’s treatment is more realistic, typical of his observation of landscape. It demonstrates his grasp of the middle-distance, where the field with figures walking through it is a more plausible space than in the Creswick. It also shows his characteristic interest in the detailed and expressive depiction of trees. The texture of the tree trunks and the fall of light and shadow across them in particularly impressive, as is the painting of the interwoven curved upper branch of the tree on the right which is created from a single twisting brushstroke.