​

Francis Edward Colthurst was a landscape and portrait artist who came from a family of timber merchants in Taunton, the city where he undertook his first artistic training. In 1900 Colthurst relocated to London upon his acceptance into the prestigious Royal Academy School where he exhibited almost annually at the summer exhibition between 1903 and 1912. Colthurst went on to become a professor at the Regent Street Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster. He was a compulsive painter and travelled widely. His experiences were recorded through a series of landscapes which attest to his journeys through Spain, Italy, Morocco and the Netherlands. Examples of these paintings can be seen in the Somerset Heritage Centre.

​

The present drawing is a study of a youth, executed from life in sensitive red chalk, accentuated with dark linear shading. A comparable study of the same youth came onto the market in 2021, quite possibly drawn in the same session as the present drawing [fig. 1]. The regular study of a live model had been a central tenet of the European academies since the 18th century and prior to that the practice had been employed more informally in the workshops of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Colthurst’s study speaks to the continuity of this legacy into the 20th century.