3-011-817 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Combe Farm," by G. Chester, in the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1864. Engraving of a painting. The "Combe," which is the subject of the admirably-painted landscape by Mr. George Chester (senior)...is...[in] Somersetshire...Its features are all familiar - the comfortable farmstead, which is the retreat of the true "sons of the soil," and the scene of, comparatively, still primitive and unsophisticated life. It is embosomed and almost hid among fine old elms, oaks, and other trees; sheltered by the woodland and the easy, graceful, slopes of swelling hills, which scarcely afford a glimpse of the blue distance, and only enough of the soft azure, the brilliant white and tender grey, to remind us of the showery English sky, which we love all the more, perhaps, for its feminine capriciousness. It is watered by a stainless streamlet, that bubbles round tiny boulders, or gushes in a pigmy cascade overhung with alders (in this view only old dead stumps), and crossed here and there by the rough plank bridge'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.