Dr Adam White the curator at Lotherton was able to obtain a back copy of the Country Life magazine for August the 12th, that carried the original article, which he kindly copied for me. It seems that the painting was found in a skip in Cornwall, by a Ms. Walker; in her words: ‘I recently found this elegant watercolour – in a skip! – and would very much like to identify the house. It is signed and dated by Philip Norman, 1911.’

How it came to be in a skip is a puzzle, although I have a couple of leads, which I will reveal in a future update, however they turn out!

The artist is interesting as he was noted for recording the history of buildings, this is a quote from Wikipedia:

He was trained as a draughtsman and painter in watercolours at the Slade School, often exhibiting at the Royal Academy. A large part of his work consisted of depicting parts of London that he knew, particularly buildings or areas which stood as a survivor of a bygone past or which were about to be demolished. Norman also recorded the history of the buildings which he painted or photographed, and works such as “London Vanished and Vanishing”, written in 1905, provide a fascinating record of bygone London. The historian Hermione Hobhouse has described Norman as one-third of the “triumvirate” of key figures whose works record the topography of London between 1890 and 1950, the others being Walter Hindes Godfrey and Percy Wells Lovell.