Evening, Fountain Abbey

Flint was one of the leading academic watercolorists of the first half of the twentieth century. In subject matter, his works often show a debt to the British watercolor masters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but his style is distinctly twentieth century particularly in his fluid handling of his medium. Flint frequently depicted figures within a landscape. Most of his compositions involve the female nude or partially draped figure in an undifferentiated setting. Here, however, the subject is one of the great medieval abbeys in Yorkshire. The subject was popular with landscape painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and in choosing it, Flint was undoubtedly making a reference to his artistic predecessors.