Penshurst (1852)

Penshurst, painted in 1852 when Brett was only nineteen, is an early student work now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Penshurst Place in Kent, the ancestral home of the Sidney family, was a celebrated destination for historically minded visitors, its medieval great hall and gardens carrying strong associations with Elizabethan literary culture through the poet Philip Sidney. Brett's choice of subject at this early date suggests engagement with the taste for historical and picturesque subjects that still dominated British painting before the Pre-Raphaelite revolution fully transformed it. The Fitzwilliam's holding of the work as part of its collection of British drawings and paintings provides context for Brett's subsequent development toward the more radical naturalism of his mature Pre-Raphaelite phase.

The painting shows a young artist working within conventional picturesque conventions, with less of the Pre-Raphaelite exactness that would characterise his work from the mid-1850s. The composition is relatively traditional, with warm light and tonal modelling that owe more to earlier British landscape practice than to the Brotherhood's innovations.