Exhibition  - Guensey Museum & Art Gallery, Rona Cole Gallery - November 2001 - January 2002

Caparne was born in Newark, Nottinghamshire and studied at the Slade School London and in Paris.  He was appointed art master to Oundle School in 1880, from which time he began to exhibit his own pictures at the Royal Academy and at many major provincial galleries.  At the same time he began to grow bulbs and seeds, particularly irises on which he became an authority. 

In 1894 Caparne’s wife died at the early age of 45.  During the same year a new headmaster at Oundle required Caparne to teach engineering drawing as well as art.  He could not cope with this and he was dismissed from his post. 

With his daughter Winifred, who was to remain with him until his death, Caparne settled in Guernsey, setting up as a grower specialising in irises.  He was to receive many honours and awards for his work with irises, and his watercolour flower studies are an important historical record.  Despite this, he lived in poverty.

Although he exhibited his final picture in 1895, Caparne constantly painted landscapes, mainly in watercolours, for his own pleasure.  He rarely parted with any of his pictures, or signed and dated them.  He spent the most creative years of his life working from a ramshackle bungalow on the cliffs above Bon Port.  During the last years of his life his studio was a tramcar body in his garden.  He died in 1940 at the age of 84.

Caparne found his inspiration all around him on the cliff tops and in the fields.  He was a romantic, almost an obsessive, whose work displays his sheer joy and wonder in nature.  He worked alone, uninfluenced by outside art movements or fashion, discarding formal rules of composition in favour of a more direct and personal communication with nature.  He developed a technique with watercolours more akin to oils, laying colour upon colour.  As a result his watercolours have a rare subtlety of depth and atmosphere.  

Much of Caparne’s work is reminiscent of the French Impressionists.    He was certainly aware of them, because on a visit to France in 1905 he had painted with Claude Monet at Giverny.  Both artists shared a love of flowers, and Caparne had taken Monet a selection of his own iris varieties.

During the 1930s Caparne turned away from watercolours in favour of pastels, adapting his technique with equal success.   Sadly though, towards the end of his life, Caparne began to lose his sight and for his last four years he was almost totally blind.

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