A bodycolour painting showing a landscape with a large white mansion on top of a hill, surrounded by trees. A male and female figure are shown collecting kindling from a broken tree trunk in the foreground, with a male figure on horseback shown riding away on a path to the left.
Inscribed on verso: His Royal Highness Prince Augustus Frederick December 8^th 1780. Aged. 7 Years & 3/4. a View of S.^t Leonards Hill, near Windsor. 

In the late eighteenth century instruction in drawing was considered to be an important part of a gentleman’s - as well as a lady’s - education and as a result George III’s sons were provided with a number of drawing masters, some of whom, like Alexander Cozens, were illustrious artists. One of the princes’ longest-serving tutors was John Alexander Gresse (1741-94), a painter likened in his day to Paul Sandby; Gresse taught the young princes between 1778 and 1793. According to the inscription on the verso, this view was painted when Prince Augustus, the King’s sixth son, was not yet 8 years old. The Prince has probably coloured in an outline drawing of the contours of the landscape provided by his drawing master, much in the manner of a modern painting-by-numbers exercise. A very similar bodycolour landscape drawing of Windsor town and castle from the River Thames was made in the same year by Prince Ernest, the fifth son, and is inscribed on the back with the Prince’s age ‘9 and a 1/2’. Disbursements of £16 6s. were made to Gresse in that year, according to an entry in the Queen’s nursery accounts. Paul Sandby, who in 1771 was described in the list of subscribers to Gandon’s fourth edition of Vitruvius Britannicus as drawing master to the eldest son, the Prince of Wales, had made outline etchings of views of Windsor in 1777, 1780 and 1782 for the use of amateur artists.

St Leonard’s Hill, south-west of Windsor, was the home from 1766 of Maria, Countess Waldegrave, who married the King’s third brother, the Duke of Gloucester, at around the time of Maria’s acquisition of the estate. The Duke failed to inform the King of his marriage until after the passing of the Royal Marriage Act in 1772. The year inscribed on this view - 1780 - marked the reconciliation between the King and the Duke after an impasse of several years. In 1783 the house (which had been designed for the Gloucesters by Thomas Sandby) was bought by William (later 3rd Earl) Harcourt, a close intimate of the King and Queen.

Bodycolour - a popular medium for landscape artists in the second half of the eighteenth century - fell out of favour in the early nineteenth century because of the perceived crudeness of bright colour and opacity in comparison with the refined delicacy of watercolour.

Catalogue entry adapted from 'George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste', London, 2004