A farm in North Yorkshire; photo by Alan Walker, via Wikimedia Commons
Minor artists appeal to me. They please without overwhelming; they provide assurance that work at levels of attainment lower than the very highest is still worth the effort. The view from mountain peaks is no doubt sublime, but Man does not live by sublimity alone.
I recently discovered a new minor artist—new to me, that is—while staying a few weeks in Whitby, an ancient town on the North Yorkshire coast. He was George Weatherill, born in 1810, the son of a farm laborer; he moved up in the world to become a bank clerk in Whitby before abandoning the world of business to concentrate on his art, which was essentially that of modest but beautifully executed watercolors of the town and its immediate surroundings. He became locally and even nationally celebrated as the Turner of the North, having encountered and been influenced by Turner’s work on a trip to London. (Turner painted Whitby several times on a visit when Weatherill was young.)
Though intensely local, Weatherill was by no means parochially minded: He taught himself Italian so that he could read about Italian artists. Three of his children became watercolorists of Whitby after him.
His exquisite, smaller than postcard-sized watercolors are mostly in the town’s Pannett Art Gallery. (Pannett was a local lawyer who left his estate for this purpose.) The gallery and adjoining museum belong to the Whitby
