San Sebastian

San Sebastian 

Charles Joseph Hullmandel after Edward Hawke Locker, 1824 

Lithograph 

Born into a naval family, Locker (1777-1849) was named after his father’s patron, Admiral Edward Hawke. He became a senior naval administrator and secretary to Admiral Edward Pellew in the East Indies and the Mediterranean. In 1813 he served with Lord John Russell in the Peninsular War and later became Commissioner of the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich.  

Locker was a keen watercolourist and his views in Spain are considered among the best from the first half of the nineteenth century. There are 60 plates in all, covering most regions of Spain, each accompanied by a two-page commentary. The majority were ‘drawn on stone’ by the English landscape painter and lithographer James Duffield Harding (1798-1863), but this plate was lithographed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789-1850), whose parents were refugees from the French revolution and settled in London. Hullmandel became one of the most important figures in the development of British lithography, a printmaking process invented by Alois Senefelder in Bavaria (c. 1796). Hullmandel developed a method for reproducing graded tonal effects and published the influential Art of Drawing on Stone in 1824. 

Locker’s view of San Sebastián-Donostia is from the west across Zurriola beach towards what is now the Old Town. The image is dominated by Mount Urgull and the fortress which withstood two assaults in July and August 1813 before surrendering on 9 September. The distant lighthouse can be seen on the left of the picture, on top of an exaggeratedly steep Mount Igeldo. Locker’s view of the town rather downplays the scale of the destruction wrought by the allied forces when the siege was finally raised, but his text is explicit: ‘the assailants, rendered furious by the obstinate valour of their opponents, committed such atrocities as greatly tarnished their victory…In the two assaults our loss exceeded 3700 men.’ 

Title: San Sebastian  

Author/Artist: Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789-1850, lithographer) after Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849, artist). 

Technique and Material: Lithograph. 

Dimensions: 180 x 280 mm. 

Published: Plate [26] from Edward Hawke Locker, Views in Spain. London: John Murray, 1824. 

Date: 1824. 

Marks and Inscriptions: upper edge, right: ‘Guipuscoa’; lower edge, left: ‘Drawn on Stone by C. Hullmandel’; centre: title as above / (referring to prior publications as a separate sheet) ‘London: Pub[lished] by Rodwell and Martin: New Bond St. Aug 1. 1823 Printed by C. Hullmandel’; right: ‘From the Original Sketch by E H Locker F.R.S.’. 

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.