Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms - t. 172

For the first part of his career, John Sowerby was the director of Sowerby’s Ellison Glass Works, one of the world’s largest producers of glass, and made a number of aesthetic innovations that helped boost sales. On the death of his father, in 1879, he continued at the firm, but began to produce children’s books and landscape watercolours and, when the company was sold in 1896, he focused on exhibiting his paintings. Combining keenly observed naturalistic detail and sophisticated decoration, they may be considered exemplars of Symbolist landscape, and have been compared to the work of the French artists, Alphonse Osbert and Henri Le Sidaner.