Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding was born at Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax in West Yorkshire in 1787. He was the third son of Nathan Theodore Fielding and was named in honour of the painters Sir Anthony van Dyck and John Singleton Copley. Commonly known as Copley Fielding, he first worked closely with his father, travelling with him to Liverpool in 1807 and then to Wales in 1808. Their works of 1804 were said to be indistinguishable from each other. In 1810 Fielding studied under the drawing master John Varley who ran a boisterous teaching studio, somewhat in the manner of Dr Thomas Munro, but with rather less decorum. Most working days ended in an impromptu boxing match, in which Varley somehow managed to succumb to his nimbler, faster pupils. His students included David Cox, John Dobson, William Henry Hunt, John Linnell, William Mulready, James Sant and William Turner of Oxford. Fielding exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours for the first time that year. He became associate that year, a full member and the society’s treasurer in 1813. He would frequently send as many as forty watercolours at a time for exhibition. He was elected the society’s president in 1831. The Royal Academy, although founded in 1768 for the noblest of reasons, quickly became hidebound in its outlook and by the turn of the 19th century, watercolours were being categorised by the Academicians as a type of drawing. At the annual exhibition, they were displayed in the same dimly-lit rooms used to show sculpture. Unimpressed, the indignant watercolourists established the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1804. That body’s charter was to raise the status of watercolour painters, and it accomplished that aim by asserting the status of watercolours as paintings, rather than mere ‘drawings’, by encouraging the technical and artistic developments necessary to make watercolour painting a medium equal to oils, and by organizing exhibitions where artists could display works that would attract new commissions. The Society changed its name in 1881 to the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, and was granted a patent to become the Royal Watercolour Society in 1905, the title it retains today. Fielding drew on the scenery of Wales and the Lake District for inspiration early in his career. The best-known and most prolific of the Fielding brothers, he was a painter of elegance, taste and accomplishment. Whilst not reaching very high in originality of purpose or of style, he has always been popular with purchasers. Fielding’s work possesses to an extreme degree the attribute of finish, the painstaking and stifling perfection of surface and visual effect that was much prized by Regency and Victorian art consumers. He painted a vast number of all sorts of views (occasionally in oil-colour) including marine subjects in large proportion, some of which, tend to the dramatic (Sailing Boat in a Storm, above). In his later years, he was drawing instructor to the influential critic John Ruskin. In 1813 Fielding married Susannah Gisborne, Varley’s sister-in-law. His wife suffered from poor health. Therefore, from 1816, Fielding divided his time between Brighton and London and in the process, added seascapes to his repertoire. In 1824 he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon, alongside Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable. He engaged largely in teaching the art of watercolour and made ample profits. Fielding undertook frequent sketching tours, exhibiting many hundreds of views at the Water-Colour Society, during the course of working his life. In 1838 he produced 350 engravings on wood and 28 on steel for Christopher Wordsworth’s book Greece: Pictorial, Descriptive and Historical.  Fielding died at Worthing, West Sussex on 2 March 1855. Representative examples of his work may be seen in the Water Colour Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Among the engraved specimens of his art is the Annual of British Landscape Scenery, published in 1839. Examples of Fielding’s work may be found in galleries all around the world. His Dunster Castle, Sunset may be found in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales as may his Stranded – Morning after the wreck and Off the Eddystone: effect of storm (1826). Manchester Art Gallery has 18 of his works and both Norwich and Southampton City Gallery’s have good representative examples of his work. His majestic Caernarvon Castle (1819) may be found in Gallery 7 of the National Museum, Cardiff.