BEN MORE FROM AUCHLYNE ROAD oil, by Frederick Richard Lee & Thomas Sidney Cooper

BEN MORE FROM AUCHLYNE ROAD oil, by Frederick Richard Lee & Thomas Sidney Cooper 
A beautiful 19th century landscape painting  of the Scottish mountain (Munro) by the renowned artists Frederick Lee & Thomas Sidney Cooper
  The painting is an oil on board, signed by both artists and dated 1854.Housed in a gilt frame.
  The image size is  47cm x 62cm, whilst overall the size is 69cm x 85 cm
The painting is in very good condition, having had a light clean. There is some slight crazing to the sky section as to be expected with age, ( see photo close ups with flash) the frame is also in very good condition. 

There is a handwritten label verso which reads

Note: According to Cooper, it was during a visit to Lee at his house in Devon that a mutual decision was made to '...paint some pictures conjointly'. Lee was to paint the landscape first and Cooper to introduce the animals - and, at Lee's insistence, to handle the financial arrangements. In the late 1840s both artists were at the height of their popularity and their exhibited collaborations in the Dutch tradition created a 'great sensation' at the Royal Academy when they first appeared. Prince Albert commented that they had '...caused a new want among patrons' and pronounced them 'the Beaumont and Fletcher of Art'. But by the mid-1850s, however, the art critics were tiring of their annual productions. To what extent the adverse criticism resulted from a gradual resentment from their fellow artists is uncertain. Lee's somewhat cavalier attitude to his profession, which he considered '...more as a pastime than as a business', together with the surprising rapidity with which both artists could produce large highly finished compositions of undoubted quality, combined with the long list of patrons eager to purchase the results, naturally rankled with artists of lesser talent. Lee and Cooper's nine consecutive years of exhibiting their collaborations at the Royal Academy and elsewhere ended in 1856. However, the fifteen Academy exhibits represent less than a quarter of their total joint productions. Both Cooper and Lee collaborated with other artists, but theirs was by far the most productive and successful partnership. Long after Lee's death at sea in 1879, Cooper was still being approached to add animals into Lee's early paintings.
                                 BEN MORE 

Ben More is a mountain in the Breadalbane region of the southern Scottish Highlands, near Crianlarich. Rising to 1,174 metres, it is a Munro and is the highest of the so-called Crianlarich Hills to the south-east of the village. There is no higher land in the British Isles south of Ben More
                                        Frederick Richard Lee

Lee was a prolific artist, based on the number of oil paintings he is known to have produced, both on canvas and on board. His subject matter choices clearly shared influences with John Constable and other contemporaries. Some of his more notable paintings were done in collaboration with Thomas Sidney Cooper (between 1848 and 1856) and Sir Edwin Landseer, Lee painting the landscape and Cooper and Landseer adding the animals. Landscapes and pastoral scenes form the majority of his painting interest, with some exceptions, for example, Cover Side, The Campfire and Gypsy Tent.

Scottish scenes figured prominently as subjects for Lee, but he also traveled extensively elsewhere in Britain and the continent: Gillingham Mill, Dorset; North Duffield Bridge, Derbyshire; Swiss Bridge, Lynedoch; Fulford Park, Exeter; Ben More looking up Glen Dochart; Shattered Oak in Bedfordshire; Sleaford, Lincolnshire; Rock of Gibraltar; and Pont du Gard, are all examples of this. 

                                             Thomas Sidney Cooper
One of the finest landscape painters of his day, he is mainly associated with pictures of cattle or sheep,[5] a fact that earned him the epithet "Cow Cooper".[8] Cooper collaborated between 1847 and 1870 with Frederick Richard Lee R.A. on several paintings, Lee undertaking the landscapes, and Cooper adding animals to complete the scene.[9] He travelled round the country, sometimes with his son, painting in Wales, Scotland and the Lake District as well as his home county of Kent.

In London he moved in elevated circles, counting many artists, politicians and writers, including Charles Dickens, as his friends. He had a long acquaintanceship with JMW Turner whom he describes in his autobiography as taking a ‘great interest in me and my success’. Cooper also was favoured by Queen Victoria who invited him to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Cooper was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1845 and Royal Academician (RA) on 22 June 1867.