View of the Reculver, Kent in 1818

James Ward is best known as an animal painter whose early work was much influenced by George Morland. In the early years of the 19th century he evolved his own style in which his great debt to Rubens is apparent. The work shows Reculver in 1818. The church had been founded, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 669 by Egbert, King of Kent, within the then 7 1/2 acres of the Roman fort of the Saxon Shore. It was a monastery with an abbot until the Viking invasions, but was demolished in 1805.