Tuesday, August 31, 2010

John William Godward - Myrhinna



signed and dated 'J.W. Godward 1915'
Rome
oil on canvas
16 x 18"

John William Godward - A Roman Beauty



signed 'J.W. Godward'
oil on canvas
21 x 17"

c. 1889

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Home Again



late 1870s (?)
oil on board
42.5 x 63.8cm

George Heming Mason - A Drinking Fountain in the Campagna



Price Realized £8,365

signed and inscribed 'DRINKING FOUNTAIN IN THE/CAMPAGNA'/GEORGE H. MASON A.R.A.' (on an old label on the reverse)
oil on canvas
12½ x 24½ in. (31.8 x 61.6 cm.)

Commissioned by Edgar Flower, Middlehill, Worcestershire, in 1858.

Commissioned in 1858, this painting is a version of one in the Tate Gallery dating from 1852. George Heming Mason was the grandson of Miles Mason, the potter. He was born at Fenton Park in Staffordshire, brought up at Wetley Abbey, near Leek, and articled to a surgeon in Birmingham. But in 1843 he left for Rome, and, with no artistic training beyond some knowledge of the work of David Cox, launched into a career as an artist. By the early 1850s he had met Arnold Böcklin and two artists who were to have a profound impact on his development, Frederic Leighton and Giovanni Costa. Leighton he idolised and was later to find a great source of moral and financial support. Costa allowed him to paint with him in the Roman campagna, and inbued with his own strong sense of poetic landscape.

In 1858 Mason inherited Wetley Abbey, the family home, and returned to England to marry. His style inevitably changed as he adapted to painting the English countryside, although he retained his interest in evoking mood, particularly in a series of idyllic subjects comparable to those of his friend Fred Walker. He seems to have been well aware of the Barbizon painters, and certainly kept in touch with Costa. Like the landscapes of Leighton, Blake Richmond, Walter Crane and George Howard, his work is generally seen in the context of the Etruscan School, although this was not officially founded by Costa until 1883, eleven years after Mason's death.

The present picture belongs to Mason's early Roman period, and is typical in subject matter and in the crystalline clarity of the forms, seen either in strong sunlight or deep shadow. In addition to being influenced by Costa, he seems to have been impressed at this date by such French artists as Hébert, Decamps and Jules Breton, whose work he saw at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Other examples of this period were included in the Mason Exhibition held at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1982. Among them were his Roman masterpiece, Ploughing in the Campagna, and the Tate version of the present picture (no. 27, illustrated in catalogue). This differs in a number of details. The buildings, the skyline, the foreground, the distant figures and the group of resting oxen, all show minor variations, while the tall tree at upper right is omitted.

Research has yet to show if Edgar Flower, who commissioned the picture, was related to Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea, who was drawn by Frederick Sandys and owned Burne-Jones's Golden Stairs (Tate Gallery). from 1852. George Heming Mason was the grandson of Miles Mason, the potter. He was born at Fenton Park in Staffordshire, brought up at Wetley Abbey, near Leek, and articled to a surgeon in Birmingham. But in 1843 he left for Rome, and, with no artistic training beyond some knowledge of the work of David Cox, launched into a career as an artist. By the early 1850s he had met Arnold Böcklin and two artists who were to have a profound impact on his development, Frederic Leighton and Giovanni Costa. Leighton he idolised and was later to find a great source of moral and financial support. Costa allowed him to paint with him in the Roman campagna, and inbued with his own strong sense of poetic landscape.

In 1858 Mason inherited Wetley Abbey, the family home, and returned to England to marry. His style inevitably changed as he adapted to painting the English countryside, although he retained his interest in evoking mood, particularly in a series of idyllic subjects comparable to those of his friend Fred Walker. He seems to have been well aware of the Barbizon painters, and certainly kept in touch with Costa. Like the landscapes of Leighton, Blake Richmond, Walter Crane and George Howard, his work is generally seen in the context of the Etruscan School, although this was not officially founded by Costa until 1883, eleven years after Mason's death.

The present picture belongs to Mason's early Roman period, and is typical in subject matter and in the crystalline clarity of the forms, seen either in strong sunlight or deep shadow. In addition to being influenced by Costa, he seems to have been impressed at this date by such French artists as Hébert, Decamps and Jules Breton, whose work he saw at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Other examples of this period were included in the Mason Exhibition held at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1982. Among them were his Roman masterpiece, Ploughing in the Campagna, and the Tate version of the present picture (no. 27, illustrated in catalogue). This differs in a number of details. The buildings, the skyline, the foreground, the distant figures and the group of resting oxen, all show minor variations, while the tall tree at upper right is omitted.

Research has yet to show if Edgar Flower, who commissioned the picture, was related to Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea, who was drawn by Frederick Sandys and owned Burne-Jones's Golden Stairs (Tate Gallery).

William James Müller - The Good Samaritan



1812-1845.

Price Realized £13,145

signed and dated 'W Müller.1843' (lower left)
oil on canvas
22 x 34 1/8 in. (55.8 x 80.7 cm.)

N. Solly, Memoir of the life of William James Müller, London, 1875, pp. 137, 167 & 334.
C.G.E. Bunt, The Life and Work of William James Müller of Bristol, Leigh-on-Sea, 1938, p. 44.

London, Royal Academy, Loan Exhibiton, 1875, no. 75.
London, Guildhall, Loan Exhibition, 1892, no. 169.


Müller exhibited an oil sketch for this picture at the British Institution in September 1842 (no. 112). Solly described the sketch as 'a fine example of harmonious colour, and sky and clouds being like a picture of Titian's, grand and powerful ...' and commented that the present picture 'is one of Muller's most powerful works, although it is said to have been completed in one day' (op.cit., pp. 137 and 167). A preparatory pencil and watercolour sketch for the painting, entitled Twighlight Egypt 1838, was exhibited in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, 1991, as no. 102.

Sir William Armstrong (1810-1900), who owned this picture by 1892, was a scientist, inventor, and businessman. He is, however, perhaps most well known as the greatest of Victorian armaments manufacturers. His 'Armstrong' gun, which was breech instead of muzzle loaded, firing a shell rather than a ball was sold all around the world. Cragside, in Northumberland (The National Trust), which he built with Norman Shaw as the architect, is one of the greatest of all late Victorian houses, and still contains a notable group of Victorian pictures. Armstrong also restored Bamburgh Castle.

William Dyce - St John leading home his adopted Mother




Price Realized £107,850

oil on panel
14½ x 12 3/8 in. (36.8 x 31.4 cm.)

Engraved
J. Thompson (Victoria and Albert Museum proof 16141).


St John, the disciple 'whom Jesus loved', who wrote the fourth Gospel and witnessed the vision on the island of Patmos which is described in Revelation, was commissioned by Christ on the cross to take care of His mother. In this deeply moving picture, so typical of Dyce in its restrained emotion and its formal clarity, the apostle conducts the Virgin home after the terrible ordeal of watching the crucifixion, he walking slowly and upright, she leaning on his arm, scarcely able to walk for grief.

The picture is a small variant of the better-known work in the Tate Gallery, in which the figures move in the other direction and a landscape-shaped composition allows Christ's tomb to be shown on the right. There is also a conceptual difference; largely because the Virgin is shown more composed but in deepest mourning, the mood is at once more sombre and more restrained.

Authorities disagree over the dating of the two versions. The Tate picture is generally said to have been starteed in 1841/2 and revised in 1851, but Marcia Pointon dates the revision to 1857 and gives 1844-60 as the overall period of gestation. Both she and the cataloguer of the Fine Art Society exhibition (loc. cit.) date the present version to the mid-1840s, but in 1963 Allen Staley wrote that it 'presumably dates from 1851, the year Dyce revised the larger picture' (loc. cit.).

What is not in doubt is that both versions betray Dyce's adherance to the Nazarene tradition and reflect his deep religious faith. A devout Anglo-Catholic, with a keen interest in ecclesiology, church music and ritual, he often chose such sympathetic subjects. Henry VI at Towton (Guildhall Art Gallery) shows the agonised battlefield meditations of a King renowned for his piety and the founder of two great educational establishments, Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. George Herbert at Bemerton (same location) focuses on the early seventeenth-century divine who wrote some of the best-loved devotional poetry in the English language.

Dyce's subject in the present picture finds a certain parallel in Rossetti's watercolour Mary in the House of St John, dating from 1856-8. There are of course connections. Although he was not conventionally religious, Anglo-Catholicism played a crucial part in Rossetti's imaginative development, while Dyce was a great admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites. In fact it was he who brought Ruskin to their defence in 1851, thus causing a sea-change in their critical fortunes.
A small oil sketch, closer to the Tate version than to this, is in the Aberdeen Art Gallery (Pointon, pl. 89).

Henry Le Jeune - 'Thy Will be Done'




Price Realized £9,560

oil on panel
11 3/8 x 9½ in. (28.8 x 24.1 cm.)

London, British Institution, 1857, no. 415.

This is a powerful depiction of the Agony in the Garden, on the Mount of Olives, in which, between the Last Supper and his arrest, Christ retired to pray. 'Agony' in this context derives from the Greek meaning a contest, and Le Jeune, through juxtaposing the solitary figure of Christ against the immensity of a luminous and starry heaven brilliantly alludes to the conflict between the two sides of Christ's nature: the human, that feared his imminent suffering, and would have avoided it, and the divine, which gave him strength. The title of the picture derives not only from the Lord's Prayer, but also to the scriptural reference: 'Father, if it be thy will, take this cup away from me. Yet not my will but thine be done'.

The apostles Peter, James and John had accompanied Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane but then withdrew from him. According to Luke's Gospel there then 'appeared to him an angel from heaven bringing him strength, and in anguish of spirit he prayed the more urgently'. In earlier depictions of the subject artists often gave the angel physical form, perhaps holding the instruments of the Passion, or a chalice and wafer, even though the gospel's reference to a cup was purely metaphorical. Le Jeune's approach is more subtle and only hints at spiritual visitation through the dramatic use of light. However, in the tangle of thorns at Christ's feet, and in the tree behind, naturalistic though they are, reference is obliquely made to Christ's impending fate on the cross.

As the critic of the Art Journal noted, the picture is 'a work that only an artist of elevated mind could have produced'. The picture is one of the finest of a group of religious works produced by Le Jeune in the 1840s and 50s. In 1845 he became drawing master at the RA and in 1848 curator. Later in his career he turned to more profitable genre scenes of the countryside, and children.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Victorian Long Whitby Jet Gold Drop Earrings C1900




These fabulous long gold Victorian Whity jet earrings are circa 1900.
The earrings are set in Whitby jet which is faceted and shimmers with reflected light.
Whitby Jet was made popular by Queen Victoria who wore it when she was in mourning for her beloved Prince Albert.
Whitby Jet is chosen for it's simple but serene and sombre appearance - it also looks very elegant.
The earrings have gold shepherd hook wires for pierced ears.
The earrings are in very good condition and look stunning when worn.
They weigh 2.9 grams.
They measure 6mm across by 43mm down - that's 1/4 an inch by 1 1/2 inches - excluding the wire which adds another 10mm.


http://www.heritagejewellery.co.uk/products/Victorian-Long-Whitby-Jet-Gold-Drop-Earrings-C1900.html

http://www.whitbyjet.co.uk/

(Sir) William Blake Richmond - Perseus and Andromeda




Price Realized £14,340

oil on panel
36 x 27 5/8 in. (91.5 x 70.2 cm.)

Stark naked, Perseus swoops out of the clouds to rescue Andromeda as, chained to a rock, she waits to become the victim of a ravening sea-monster. He carries neither the sword with which he traditionally despatches the monster, nor the gorgon's decapitated head which is also sometimes shown as his weapon of defence. The monster itself is conspicuous by its absense, and even Andromeda is unusually conceived, being shown draped when she is usually nude.

In view of these anomalies, it was suggested in the Victorian Imagination exhibition catalogue that the subject may not be that of Perseus and Andromeda at all, but some scene of mythological rape such as Boreas's abduction of Oreithyia. However, while this hypothesis solves one set of problems, it creates another. When Richmond painted a later version of the Perseus and Andromeda theme, one which has no iconographical ambiguity (private collection; Reynolds, op. cit, pl. 104), he retained the pose of Perseus as the hero appears in the present picture, and again shows Andromeda partially draped. Moreover, the Forbes picture has been identified with an Andromeda that Richmond included in his retrospective exhibition at the New Gallery in 1900-1.

In any event, the picture gives the impression of not being wholly resolved or finished, a feature which, together with its unusually strong colouring, makes it more intense in feeling than many of Richmond's works. A full-scale composition drawing for the painting, executed in black chalk, is in the same private collection as Richmond's later treatment of the subject, mentioned in the last paragraph.

As Simon Reynolds observes, the air-borne and anatomically distorted figure of Perseus surely owes something to William Blake, or perhaps to such a Blake-inspired work as The Creation of Light (Tate Gallery) by Richmond's father, George Richmond, painted when the artist was only seventeen in 1826. George Richmond had been one of the so-called 'Ancients', the group of young men who encountered Blake in his old age and looked on him as a beloved and revered mentor. It had been hoped that the younger Richmond would be born on the anniversary of Blake's birthday, 28 November. As it happened, he arrived a day late, but he was still given the forenames William Blake in the great man's honour, while another 'Ancient', Samuel Palmer, acted as his godfather. Blake remained almost as much of a presence in his life as he was in that of Geroge Richmond himself.

Apart from its appearance in the New Gallery retrospective, the picture does not seem to have been exhibited by Richmond, perhaps because of its lack of finish. However, it attracted the attention and was bought by Andrew Lang, the classical scholar and folklorist probably best known today as the author of the eleven so-called Coloured Fairy Books, published by Longmans with illustrations by H.J. Ford between 1889 and 1910. Richmond painted a striking portrait of Lang (Scottish National Portrait Gallery), which he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. Three years later his likeness of Mrs Lang (whereabouts unknown) was shown at the New Gallery's opening exhibition.

The story of Perseus and Andromeda was central to late Victorian classicism. One of the first to handle it was D.G. Rossetti. During a brief flirtation with classicism in the mid-1860s, he made drawings for a painting of Perseus showing Andromeda the gorgon's head in a pool. Unfortunately, the severed head was too much for the prospective buyer and the project went no further, but by the 1870s other artists were taking up the theme. Edward Poynter treated it in one of four large canvases which he painted for the billiard room at Wortley Hall, near Sheffield, in the 1870s, and in 1875 his brother-in-law Burne-Jones accepted a commission to paint a series of illustrations to the story for the music room of Arthur Balfour's London house, 4 Carlton Gardens. Individual pictures were completed, but the series as a whole remained unfinished at the artist's death in 1898. Frederic Leighton was another exponent. One of his most ambitious (not to say bizarre) late works was a Perseus and Andromeda exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891, and a circular-shaped painting of Perseus on Pegasus coming to the Rescue of Andromeda (Leicestershire Museum) was still on the easel when he died five years later. The tradition lived on into the next generation. Frank Dicksee, who had studied under Leighton in the Royal Academy Schools, painted Andromeda chained to the rock as his contribution to the panels in the hall at Alma-Tadema's house in Grove End Road.

We are grateful to Simon Reynolds for his help in preparing this entry.

Herbert James Draper - Study for 'The Sea Maiden'




Price Realized £15,535

oil on board
6 1/8 x 10 7/8 in. (15.5 x 27.7 cm.)

This is a study for Draper's Royal Academy exhibit of 1894, no. 370, his first public success. When shown the picture was the property of Marcus Huish, then managing director of The Fine Art Society, but it is now in the collection of the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro. Preliminary studies for the picture involved numerous trips off the Devon coast and the Isles of Scilly, while the ancient boat was painted from a model of one fashioned from wax.

The subject is taken from a quotation in Algernon Swinburne's poem, Castelard:

A song of drag-nets hauled thwart seas
And plucked up with rent sides and caught therein
A strange haired woman with sad singing lips.

The sea and the nude feature prominently in Draper's work. Perhaps his most celebrated picture is The Lament for Icarus, now in Tate Britain.

John Rogers Herbert - Our Saviour subject to his Parents at Nazareth



Price Realized £38,240

signed and dated 'J.R. Herbert. RA 1860' (lower right)
oil on canvas
40¼ x 62¼ in. (102.2 x 158.2 cm.)

This is one of three large versions of Herbert's most famous composition. The first was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847. A second, dated 1856, now hangs in the Guildhall Art Gallery. This, the third, dated 1860, formerly hung in the collection of the Earl of Iveagh at Elveden, the house in Norfolk given in exchange for his territories to Maharajah Duleep Singh, and transformed by him into an Indian palace. Iveagh, a Guinness, bought the house in 1895 and simultaneously built a magnificent collection of Rembrandts, Vermeers, Reynolds and Gainsboroughs which is now left to the nation as the Iveagh Bequest, at Kenwood House.

A keen admirer of Pugin, Herbert converted to Catholicism in 1840, and thereafter painted predominantly religious subjects which show a familiarity with the work of William Dyce and the Nazarenes. The composition was painted at the height of his career: Herbert was elected R.A. in 1846, and the picture is said to have prompted Millais to paint Christ in the House of his Parents exhibited at the R.A. in 1850 (see fig. 1). The composition also pre-empts Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids of the same year, with its similarly canopied structure, and division of the composition.

When exhibited at the Royal Academy, the catalogue indicated that the landscape was 'painted from a very careful drawing made at Nazareth'. Herbert's desire for topographical and historical accuracy was unusual at this date, and again pre-empts Holman Hunt's travels to the Holy Land of 1854, 1869 and 1873. The subject also was unusual in English Art, but may have been inspired by St. Luke's Gospel: 'the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom'. Christ's fate is prefigured in the cross of wood in the foreground, in the strips from Joseph's lathe, and in the pensive gaze of the Virgin, which particularly delighted the critic of the Athenaeum who thought the picture 'one of the most poetical and imaginative in this collection'.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Punch & Judy archive is centre-stage at V&A. Oh yes it is




Historian's collection of books, scripts and drawings documents 400 years of knockabout puppet show

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/26/punch-judy-v-and-a

Frederick Daniel Hardy - My Studio



Price Realized £8,365

signed dated 'F. D. Hardy/1898' (lower right)
oil on board, laid down on panel
10 x 15 3/8 in. (25.4 x 39.1 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1898, no. 841.

This was the last work exhibited at the Royal Academy by Hardy, who had shown there for almost fifty years. It depicts his studio at Cranbrook, Kent, the town whose activities and interiors had provided him with much of his subject matter throughout his career. The discipline of observing reflection in mirrors has a long provenance in the history of painting. The circular mirrors in this picture recall Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage, of 1434, in which the protagonists are reflected. Hardy would undoubtedly have seen this in the National Gallery, London.

Frederick Walker - At the Sick Man's Door; an illustration to Thackeray's 'Adventures of Philip'



signed with initials 'F.W.' (lower right)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour, with gum arabic
7½ x 5¼ in. (9.1 x 13.3 cm.)

This watercolour was worked up from an illustration that appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 5, p. 129, February 1862. William Makepeace Thackeray, the editor of The Cornhill, serialised his novel Philip on his Way Through the World over a period of two years from 1861-2. Thackeray himself illustrated the first few installments, but having been introduced to Walker early in 1861 he made the young artist his protegé, commissioning him to take over the illustrations from May 1861. Walker produced a long series of woodcuts, ranging from illuminated capitals to full page compositions several of which, including Philip in Church and At the Sick Man's Door provided the designs for finished watercolours.

Philip was Thackeray's last completed novel, and its characters are largely those who populated his earlier novels. Pendennis, Thackeray's hero of ten years before, is the narrator. His young friend Philip is a struggling journalist whose fortunes are overshadowed by his father's secret past. Philip falls in love with Charlotte, daughter of General Baynes, a trustee of Philip's rightful inheritance, but the match is fiercely opposed by Charlotte's parents.

In Walker's illustration, Philip and Charlotte are about to enter the bedroom where General Baynes lies ill. Mrs Baynes waits 'with hot tearless eyes and livid face, a wretched sentinel outside the sick chamber'. The anxiety of the moment can be read in Philip's pensive face as he waits while 'little Char' gently turns the door handle. Both avert their eyes from the questioning gaze of Mrs Baynes.

In the next moment there will be blessings and happiness, for once beyond that door which seems such an ominous barrier in Walker's illustration, the couple are welcomed by the General: 'the poor man laid the hands of the young people together, and his own upon them. The suffering to which he had put his daughter seemed to be the crime which specially affected him. He thanked Heaven to be able to see that he was wrong.' These paternal blessings are conferred in timely fashion as General Baynes dies soon after.

William Henry Hunt - Still-life with basket, nest, egg, red currants and ladybird



Price Realized £3,824

signed 'W. HUNT.' (lower right)
pencil and watercolour with gum arabic and with scratching out
7¼ x 11¼ in. (18.4 x 28.6 cm.)

Hunt was apprenticed to John Varley at the age of seven and worked with John Linnell for much of his early career. Hunt developed a new technique in which pure watercolour is applied to a ground of Chinese white. He perfected a style of stippling which gives his finished works a jewel-like enamelled effect. Birds' nests were a favourite subject and Hunt earned himself the nickname 'Birds' Nest Hunt'. Chaffinch and sparrow's nests feature with particular regularity. In the present watercolour the empty basket perfectly echoes the empty nest: two circlets, one woven by man and one by birds.

Eloise Harriet Stannard - Study of convolvulus and marigolds



Price Realized £7,768

oil on card
15¾ x 11¾ in. (40 x 29.9 cm.)

Eloise Harriet Stannard until 1915

Eloise Harriet Stannard came from a distinguished family of Norfolk artists. She was the daughter of Alfred Stannard and the sister of Alfred George Stannard who were both exhibiting artists. She is often confused with Emily Stannard, wife of Joseph Stannard, who painted meticulous fruit and flower pieces in a traditional Dutch style. Eloise Harriet exhibited still-lives at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Royal Society of British Artists. Many of her works are in the Castle Museum, Norwich.

This delightful example was formerly in the collection of Sir John Witt, a connoisseur whose father, Sir Robert, founded the Witt photographic library, now part of the Courtauld Institute, London.

Henrietta Rae (Mrs Ernest Normand) - The Garland



Price Realized £8,963

signed 'H. Rae.' (lower left)
oil on canvas
15 1/8 x 13¼ in. (38.4 x 33.6 cm.)


This picture is also known as 'Passiflora', from the passion flowers that adorn the idealized Greek beauty around her neck. Henrietta Rae shared a studio with her husband Ernest Normand, whom she met at the Royal Academy Schools, at 3, The Studios, Holland Park Road. Leighton was a neighbour, and gave frequent advice. Rae later recalled 'His criticisms, though severe, and at times almost scathing, always left me with the feeling that he expected me some day to do good work'. Rae was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy and started her career with the distinction of being the first woman to be admitted to Heatherley's School of Art.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

George Elgar Hicks - The Latest Arrival



Price Realized £3,824

signed with initials 'GEH' (lower right)
pencil and red chalk, heightened with white, on grey paper
15 x 10¾ in. (38.2 x 27.4 cm.)

Hicks made his reputation with animated crowd scenes such as Dividend Day at the Bank, and he also worked as a society portrait painter, but his portraits have none of the lucidity of the genre scenes that he painted in the late 1850s and early 1860s from which period this watercolour probably dates. It was lithographed for Hick's Studies of the Human Figure, part 6, pl. 4, and formed a culmination to this series of sensitive figure studies. The interplay between the parents, their son and their newborn is handled with great feeling, the mother raising a cautious hand over her son who peers at the sleeping baby in his father's large arms.

Phillip Richard Morris - Farewell; and The Return



Price Realized £5,019

the first signed 'P.R. Morris A.R.A. (lower right)
pencil and watercolour, heightened with touches of bodycolour and with gum arabic
both 14 3/8 x 11 3/8 in. (36.5 x 28.9 cm.)
a pair (2)

Morris exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy between 1858 and 1902. He painted both historical and biblical subjects, but marine associations are particularly strong in his work. In 1884 he exhibited Sweethearts and Wives, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884, which shows women and children walking away from the quay, their relatives having embarked on their voyage, while Land Ahoy! was sold in these Rooms, 4 November 1994, for £9,200.

John Ritchie - A Vestry Meeting - Something Wrong with the Accounts



Price Realized £26,290

signed with initials 'JR' (lower left)
oil on canvas
17 5/8 x 23¾ in. (44.8 x 60.4 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1867, no. 281.

Many Victorian genre paintings dealt with the related concepts of personal nobility, honesty and civic responsibility amongst lower and middle class society. In Ritchie's rather humorous A Vestry Meeting, Something Wrong with the Accounts righteousness will probably prevail. Various council members clearly register alarm about missing parish funds from their budgetary records and ledgers. The humorous mood of this picture is particularly poignant when one considers that immorality and cheating were not amusing concepts for most Victorians who denounced these tendencies as evidence of sinful depravity, exalting instead the benefits of personal accountability and Christian virtue. Amid the disarray of fallen papers and books the room is dominated by a large wall map outlining the plan of the unnamed parish, a discovery has just been made that church funds or property have been misappropriated. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867, this painting was executed at the time of the Commons enquiry into metropolitan local government which recommended the abolition of the vestry and district boards.

Ritchie specialised in panoramic paintings of contemporary Victorian life, his best-known work being A Summer Day in Hyde Park of 1858. A thread of social comment runs through much of his work and he chose to tackle hotly debated political issues such as the present work. Indeed, his last exhibited work at the Royal Academy in 1875 was Right of Way which dealt with a highly topical and controversial subject. In the 1860s and 70s there was a movement against enclosures and the rights to common land which culminated in the battle for public right to Epping Forest. The Commons intervened and there ensued years of debate until it was finally resolved in court in 1874. The verdict was then confirmed by the Royal Commission which had been set up meanwhile by Parliament.

The central composition shows allegiance to Wilkie's Distraining for Rent (1815) with the heated argument conducted over a table, the angry and abused parties to the left leaning forward and pointing at the guilty party who stands defiantly to the right. Like Wilkie's painting the poorer members of society challenge their more wealthy and well-dressed adversaries and is thus a direct critique of the inequities of nineteenth century society.

Benjamin Williams Leader - A River Landscape ...



[A River Landscape with a Fisherman making Eel Traps]
1864
oil on canvas
80 x 132cm

John Atkinson Grimshaw - A Shepherd with his Flock in a Mountainous Landscape



(Lake Buttermere from Hassness)

1865
oil on canvas
44.5 x 59.7cm

Friday, August 27, 2010

Doorway



Abbott Fuller Graves

(Sir) Samuel Luke Fildes - Homeless and Hungry



Price Realized £10,158

pencil, watercolour and bodycolour, with gum arabic
6 7/8 x 9¾ in. (17.5 x 24.8 cm.)

This is a watercolour worked up from the engraving that appeared in the first edition of The Graphic in December 1869 and which set the agenda for the most influential of Victoran weeklies. While planning the first issue of the magazine, William Thomas had asked Fildes to draw something 'more important' than anything he had drawn before. Given a free choice of subject matter, Fildes found his inspiration in a sketch he had made years before, when walking past a police station on a winter night and seeing a crowd of people queuing for admission to the Casual Ward. The scene had made a lasting impression upon him, and the etching that he produced for William Thomas captures the bitter cold and dejection of those desperate for shelter.

Fildes did not rely on memory alone. He returned to the police station, he spoke with those who queued there. He painted, not a generic crowd of street people, but a group portrait, as he commented in the article that accompanied his engraving: 'The figures in the picture before us are... real people who received the necessary order for admission on a recent evening'.

When Charles Dickens saw the engraving, he was convinced that Fildes should provide the illustrations for his latest novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and when Fildes had proved to Dickens that he could draw pretty girls as well as wretches, he did indeed win the commission. The queue for the Casual Ward continued to occupy Fildes mind, however, and he developed the composition for a 1874 oil painting which he exhibited at the Royal Academy. Dickens described the figures as 'sphinxes against that dead wall', a phrase that suggests how very distant and strange could be the productions of realist art.

Edward Henry Corbould - Cold



Price Realized £11,950

signed 'Edward Henry Corbould.' (lower centre) and dated 'January 20th/1869.' (lower right, on the step) and inscribed 'Cold' (lower centre within a decorative border of holly berries)
pencil, pen and brown ink, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic, arched
11½ in. x 16 in. (29 x 41 cm.)

This poignant watercolour refuses to tell its story. The woman rests her head on some steps which suggest an entrance or an exit, but we cannot know where they might lead. Has she been cast out of a home, or has she been denied access?

Corbould depicted the archetypal fallen woman in The Woman Taken in Adultery, which shows Mary Magdalen prostrate. The present subject carries echoes of that biblical fall, but is perhaps more disturbing in its anonymity. Cold anticipates another great Victorian rendering of the isolated female. Frederick James Shields' One of Our Breadwatchers (1886) shows a young girl huddling in a makeshift shelter, with snow piled around her as she guards the bread. Both Shields and Corbould handle their subjects with pathos, but their paintings have about them a sense of mystery that guards against sentimentality.

Corbould came from a family of artists and studied at the Royal Academy Schools. He exhibited at the New Water-Colour Society from 1837 and at the Royal Academy from 1835 to 1874. His work focused on historical subjects, often literary, inspired by Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare. The Woman Taken in Adultery was bought by Prince Albert in 1842 initiating a long association between Corbould and the Royal Family. Many of his works entered Royal Collections at Osbourne House and Buckingham Palace, while Corbould himself was appointed 'instructor of historical painting' to the Royal Family, a post he held for twenty-one years.

Hon. John Collier - Trouble



1850-1924.

Price Realized £16,730

oil on canvas
40 x 48 in. (101.5 x 122 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1898, no. 657.

Collier produced numerous portraits and history pictures but he was best known for his so called 'problem pictures' which had open-ended psychological dramas left for viewers to interpret. In spite of Collier's protestation that 'the little tragedies of modern life' had 'perfectly plain' meanings, Trouble nevertheless remains ambiguous. A younger woman weeps to the left, while an older woman grips her sewing machine while looking anxiously at the shadows. What has transpired, and who is approaching? Are the women transgressors, or victims? Collier specialised in such moments of dramatic tension.

Augustus Leopold Egg - Night on the River Thames, a study for 'Past and Present', Part III (recto); and a study of a woman and child (verso)



Price Realized £8,365

oil on board
6 7/8 x 8 1/2 in. (17.4 x 21.6 cm.)

Possibly the artist's studio sale, Christie's, London, 18 May 1863, lot 124(?).
with George Davidson, Glasgow.
Anon. sale, Christie's, Glasgow, 24 February 1989, lot 227, as Circle of Augustus Leopold Egg, when acquired by the present owner.


This is a small study for the final canvas in Egg's monumental triptych of modern morality, Past and Present, now in Tate Britain. Conceived in three parts, it depicts the fate of a family ruined by a mother's adultery. In the first, the sin is discovered by her husband. In the second, her daughters' fate is described, orphaned and outcast from society five year's later on account of her disgrace. They stare at the same moon as appears in the third, at which the mother also gazes, dressed in rags and sheltering under a dry arch in the Adelphi. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, the following fictional narrative was appended to the title:

August the 4th. Have just heard that B- has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both their parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!.

The series caused a sensation when exhibited, exacerbated no doubt by reviews such as that given by the Athenaeum. 'Mr Egg's unnamed picture is divided into three compartments, each more ghastly and terrible than the other, till in the last we come to such a sink of misery and loathsomeness, painted with such an unhealthy determination to dissect horror and to catalogue the dissecting-room that we turn from what is a real and possible terror as from an impure thing that seems out of place in a gallery of laughing brightness, where young, unstained, unpainted and happy faces come to chat and trifle. There must be a line drawn as to where the horrors that should not be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line'. The Atheneaum continued of the concluding scene: 'The destitute wife under the dark grave-vault shadow of an Adelphi arch - last refuge of the homeless sin, vice and beggary of London: the thin, starved legs of a bastard child - perhaps dead at her breast - protrude from her rags. There was never such moonlight painted as from that loathsome sewer arch you see mantling the yellow river with liquid gold'.

While the Art Journal also thought the subject 'too poignant for a series of paintings' it nevertheless praised the final episode as an 'unexampled success - we use the term in its most literal sense. We congratulate the painter on the inferno of the Adelphi arches: they are the lowest of all the profound deeps of human abandonment in this metropolis; but he has forgotten the rats which meet in hungry hundreds on the vantage-ground left by the retiring tide, - those inhabitants of lower London would have assisted the desolation of the place'.

The sketch no doubt found a place in the Forbes collection to recall other great works by artists on the same theme: Redgrave's The Outcast of 1851 (R.A. Diploma Gallery) and G.F. Watts Found Drowned and Under a Dry Arch (of 1848-50, The Watts Gallery) for example. Egg was a friend of Holman Hunt, whose The Awakening Conscience (Tate Britain) executed in 1853, also challenged Victorian society to examine its double standards. Egg's picture was painted directly after the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 which allowed wives to be divorced for adultery alone, while a husband's infidelity had to be accompanied by another offence, such as incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion. Egg, rather than being judgemental, appears to have sympathy with his heroine. In the Tate version the posters behind the woman advertise the Haymarket plays, Tom Taylor's Victims and Tom Parry's A Cure for Love, which suggest the adulteress's status as an object of pathos.

Augustus Jules Bouvier - Anticipation



Price Realized £2,629

signed and dated 'G.BOUVIER/1877' (upper left) and indistinctly inscribed and numbered '[NO]3/Ant[cipation]/By...Bouvier/1... .../... ..' (on an old label attached to the backboard)
pencil and watercolour with scratching out
12 5/8 x 6 in. (32.1 x 15.3 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1877, no. 911.

Bouvier was born in London and studied at the Royal Academy. He became an associate member of the New Water-Colour Society in 1852 and a full member in 1856.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Abraham Solomon - A Sketch from Memory



Price Realized £17,925

signed and dated 'A Solomon 1851' (lower right)
oil on canvas, painted arch
12 x 14¼ in. (30.5 x 36.2 cm.)

This young woman is clearly not a professional artist. Well dressed and evidently with time on her hands, she is one of the innumerable Victorian amateurs who enjoyed exercising their aritstic talents, which were often considerable. We can imagine her receiving early instruction from an itinerant drawing-master, someone like John Sell Cotman, David Cox, or one of their successors.

As the cataloguers of the Pursuit of Leisure exhibition observe, the picture also invites a 'more sentimental reading'. The girl's 'male subject is clearly not present, and her abstracted gaze suggests a reverie of imagination or memory. Her situation, seated on a balcony, overlooking a continental landscape, whilst supported by pillows, wrapped in a fur-edged jacket and supplied with the delicacy of grapes, might inform a Victorian audience that she is convalescent and using her artistic skills to focus her reflections on the beloved at home.'

Edith Hayllar - A Summer Shower



One of my favourite paintings.

Price Realized £358,650

signed and dated 'EDITH HAYLLAR 1883' (lower left) and inscribed ' 'A Summer Shower'/Miss Edith Hayllar/Castle Priory/...ford' (on a fragmentary label on the reverse)
oil on card
21 x 17 3/8 in. (53.4 x 44.2 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1883, no. 420.

'To my mind this is one of the most charming genre scenes of the nineteenth century, a rustic, anglicised version of Tissot. It is wonderfully redolent of an English summer afternoon, with sets of inconsequential tennis, showers, lemonade, and tea doubtless to follow'. So wrote Christopher Wood in an article for the Connoisseur magazine of 1974 (op. cit.), of this, one of the most widely exhibited, widely illustrated and deservedly popular of all the Forbes pictures.

Edith was one of the four artistic daughters of James Hayllar who exhibited alongside their father at the Royal Academy in the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s. It is typical of the spirit in which Kip Forbes has formed the collection that examples by each are included in this sale, by James Hayllar, by Jessica, by Mary, and lot by Kate. Edith was the second daughter, two years the junior of her sister Jessica, and with her the most accomplished of the family. Not only were the sisters close in age, but they enjoyed each other's company. The family recall them setting their easels in the hall of their house, Castle Priory, on the banks of the Thames, near Wallingford, in Berkshire, at either end of the room, each choosing a different subject, but able to converse. The house provided the sisters with their principal inspiration, and perhaps it was sibling rivalry that spurred them to produce such memorable work. Each received a thorough training from their father, James, who from ten till four each day taught them drawing and perspective before allowing them to paint. Evenings were spent modelling in clay, and print-making with either etching or mezzotint. Such tuition stood each of them in good stead, for their pictures show the remarkable degree of skill that was often achieved in the field of Victorian genre painting, even by its more modest practitioners.

Edith liked to depict the aftermath of various sporting activities: lunch after shooting, or tea after boating on the lake. The family enjoyed leisurely exercise - games of croquet were innumerable - and given the changeable nature of the British summer the incident in the present picture was no doubt a not infrequent occurrence. This, and the fact that her brothers and sisters would have been happy to pose for her (the siblings numbered nine in total), accounts for the delightful informality of the composition. The young man to the left may have been a nephew of the artist George Dunlop Leslie who had a neighbouring house called Riverside, and who later married one of the Hayllar family. The mania for tennis had swept the country after its invention in 1874, and was especially popular with the young, for whom it provided better exercise than archery or croquet. The first Wimbledon championships for men were held in 1874 while those for women followed in 1884. The game was subsequently captured by many artists, perhaps most memorably by Lavery, whose pictures, like this, are as much about summer as they are about tennis.

Edith exhibited not only at the Royal Academy from 1881 to 1897 but also at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Institute of Oil Painters, and the Dudley Gallery, then much favoured by women artists. After her marriage in 1900 to Rev. Bruce Mackay she lived in Sutton Courtenay where her husband was vicar. Curiously she appears not to have painted after leaving her family, and indeed her granddaughter was unaware that her grandmother had painted at all, until after her death in 1948. The enchanted life lived at Castle Priory seems to have been so intrinsic to her art, that she lost inspiration after leaving it.

We are grateful to Christopher Wood for his help in preparing this entry.

James Hayllar - The Only Daughter




Price Realized £41,825

signed and dated 'J Hayllar. 1875' (lower right)
oil on canvas
44 x 60 in. (111.8 x 152.4 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1875, no. 624.

Artistic dynasties were not unusual in Victorian England, but few attained the distinction of the Hayllars, where five members of the family exhibited at the Royal Academy towards the end of the century. In addition to producing a son who was an engraver, James produced four remarkable daughters, each of whom he taught. Examples of their work can be seen in the present sale: that of Edith, Jessica , Mary and Kate.

James Hayllar was born in Chichester in 1829, and after overcoming family opposition enrolled at Cary's Art School in 1842. Francis Cary was a respected historical painter who later took over Sass's Academy in Bloomsbury. He is now principally remembered as tutor to Rossetti and Millais. On completing his studies, Hayllar made a tour of the continent, where he encountered Leighton in Rome in in 1851. His likeness can be seen in Leighton's first great canvas, Cimabue's Madonna carried through the streets of Florence, which was purchased by Queen Victoria, and is now in the Royal Collection, though on loan to the National Gallery. On his return, Hayllar exhibited at the Royal Academy literary and historical genre. However in 1866 he started a series of hugely popular genre studies of children. The first of these was Miss Lily's Carriage stops the Way, in which a child, no more than four years old, has her cloak adjusted before her first party. This was followed by The First Flirtation and The Return from the Ball. After these successes he was proposed as an Associate of the Royal Academy by William Powell Frith and Eyre Crowe, but he missed election by one vote and never tried again. Not being part of the Academy circle he withdrew from London life, and took large houses in the country. In 1865 he submitted pictures to the Academy from Carlton Rookery, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, while a decade later he moved to Castle Priory, on the banks of the Thames, near Wallingford in Berkshire. He was to live there until after the death of his wife, and his move to Bournemouth in 1899.

According to the painted legacy of his daughters, Castle Priory was the setting for an exceptionally happy family life, filled with innumerable children (he had nine himself, but neighbours and cousins frequently visited) where days were filled with games of tennis as well as artistic endeavour. The house was to provide his family with inspiration, and it is interesting to note how few of them painted after their marriages. Hayllar obviously felt their departure from home keenly, for he amplified the theme in the present picture. The only daughter stands counterpoised between her adored father and future husband, whose dynastic duty is made plain by placing his head between the portraits of past generations on the wall behind him. The interior and the occupations of its inhabitants are described in detail: particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of a sewing machine at the centre of the picture.

We are grateful to Christopher Wood for his help in preparing this entry.

Frederick Daniel Hardy - After the Party



Price Realized £23,900

signed and indistinctly dated 'FD Hardy 1871' (lower right)
oil on canvas
27¼ x 42 7/8 in. (69.2 x 108.9 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1876, no. 916.

Sympathetic depictions of the plight of servants, exhausted by long hours undertaking hard, physical work, were rare in Victorian art. Cooks were often caricatured as being obese and slovenly, while maids were lampooned for trying to emulate their employers dress and habits. Hardy's empathy is touching, and the picture is a departure from his usual humourous scenes of children engaged in adult activities such as Playing at Doctors (Victoria and Albert Museum). Hardy spent much of his working life in Cranbrook, Kent, and was a member of the artistic colony that included Thomas Webster and George Bernard O'Neill.

William Powell Frith - Hope; and Fear



Price Realized £33,460

the latter signed and dated 'W P Frith 1869.' (lower right) and both inscribed 'The copyright of this picture is reserved & registered/W.P. Frith 1869' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
each 15½ x 14 in. (39.3 x 35.5 cm.)
a pair (2)

These two Hogarthian pendants are smaller versions of the pair exhibited by Frith at the R.A. of 1869, no. 82, of which the Art Journal commented: 'Mr. Frith depicts in two compartments within one frame, according to his accustomed point, a domestic crisis under the suggestive title 'Hope and Fear'. In the first scene a young gentleman sustains, as best he can, an interview with the father of a girl to whose affections he aspires. His position, we fear, is not secure; he may have to wait awhile. In a second frame we behold a contemporaneous incident: the young lady herself, deeply moved, seeking consolation of her mother. On both sides it is a moment of painful suspense. As regards the Art brought to bear upon the incident little remains to be said: we are always sure of cleverness when we encounter Mr Frith'.

The pictures were much enjoyed by other critics who delighted in Frith's keen-eyed characterisation. The Illustrated London News was more hopeful of the father, who they thought a 'beneficed clergyman'. In the 'plump and sympathetic' maternal face, they detected 'the look of irrepressible pride ... mingling with something of confidence' about the romantic outcome.

The subject of matrimonial happiness pre-occupied Frith. In addition to being married he supported a mistress and between the two households he fathered nineteen children.

James Collinson - To Let



Price Realized £59,750

oil on canvas, painted oval
24¼ x 18½ in. (51.5 x 47 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1857, no. 102.
Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, 1919.
Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1920.

Collinson was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and this is perhaps his best known picture. Though dextrous and with a brilliant finish it shows little intellectual Pre-Raphaelite purpose however, and presents instead as an exemplary, if ambiguous, piece of Victorian domestic genre, much in the manner of William Powell Frith. A married lady draws a Venetian blind to reveal a sign in the window offering furnished appartments 'To Let'. However, the relationship of the title to the contents of the painting is not immediately obvious, and as the Art Journal commented, 'the point of the title is not very clear'. The picture has always been open to diverse interpretation. When lent to an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries eighty years after it was painted, along with its pendant For Sale, a smaller version of which is offered as the following lot in this sale, the critic of the Times observed: 'There are hints ... in the pair of pictures For Sale and To Let by James Collinson ... that some Victorian artists had pretty shrewd notions about comparative iniquity'. Would a Victorian audience, alert to the 'language of flowers' and the pots containing a lily and a 'Bleeding Heart', have interpreted the subject as a variation of Mr Pickwick's amorous landlady, Mrs Bardell, as popularized by Dickens? The extent to which Collinson was attempting a double-entendre, or any moral purpose, is unclear.

Born in Mansfield, the son of a bookseller, Collinson entered the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there for the first time in 1847. The attention to detail in The Charity Boy's Debut, so impressed Rossetti that he pronounced Collinson 'a born stunner' and invited him to join the Brotherhood. Collinson later became engaged to Rossetti's poet sister Christina, but she broke it off prior to his return to the Catholic faith, and his entry to Stoneyhurst in 1850. Having been nicknamed 'the doormouse' by fellow members of the P.R.B., and teased by Hunt for needing 'to be waked up at the conclusion of the noisy evenings to receive our salutations', Collinson resigned his membership on the grounds that he could not 'as a Catholic, assist in spreading the artistic opinions of those who were not'. Collinson failed to complete his novitiate, and left the monastery and resumed painting in 1854. He later married the sister-in-law of another Catholic convert, John Rogers Herbert. Between 1847 and 1870 he exhibited seventeen paintings at the Royal Academy and also contributed to the Society of British Artists where he was secretary from 1861 to 1870, and the British Institution. Though principally resident in London, he made frequent visits to Brittany where his son Robert was a seminarian, and it was there that he executed a painting of The Holy Family.

Well known through engravings, a smaller version of this picture exists in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Harold Speed - Autumn: study for a lunette



Price Realized £2,390

pencil and watercolour with bodycolour, painted arch
17½ x 32¼ in. (44.5 x 82 cm.)

Speed studied in Italy before returning to England in 1895, when he entered the Royal Academy's competition for the best design for a wall decoration in a public building. The Studio, 1899, described the present watercolour as 'very well imagined and very capably executed ... In this design he turned happily to account the inspirations derived from his travel abroad, and made evident enough the influence which the glowing colour and rich variety of form characteristic of Southern Europe had exercised over him.' (op.cit., p. 159). He was afterwards commissioned to execute the lunette in spirit fresco on the walls of the Royal Academy's refreshment room. Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (1872-1945) also executed a prize-winning lunette design Spring in December 1897 and Sir William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens (1862-1943) executed Summer.

Richard Dadd - The Haunt of the Fairies



Price Realized £47,800

oil on canvas, painted oval
23 7/8 x 20 in. (60.6 x 50.8 cm.)

No Victorian exponent of fairy painting was more remarkable than Richard Dadd. He was less prolific than Noel Paton or J.A. Fitzgerald, the other most considerable talents involved, but his mental disturbance took the genre to a level of intensity which they were unable to touch. To compare their work with his is to experience a vivid illustration of Coleridge's famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination.

Dadd's greatest fairy pictures are the two masterpieces he painted in Bethlem Hospital after going mad and murdering his father in 1843: Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8; private collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64; Tate Gallery). However, in the years immediately preceding his committal, he painted a small group of fairy subjects, of which The Haunt of the Fairies is one. Others are Titania Sleeping (Musée du Louvre, Paris), shown at the Royal Academy in 1841; Puck (private collection), which appeared at the Society of British Artists the same year; and 'Come unto these Yellow Sands' (private collection), exhibited at the RA in 1842. Superficially these paintings appear more conventional than Contradiction or The Fairy Feller, but they too betray a disturbing and slightly sinister quality, eminently suited to their subjects, which seems to anticipate the tragedy of 1842. The menacing canopy of bats' wings which overhangs the action in Titania Sleeping is a good example.

A smaller version of The Haunt of the Fairies, entitled Evening, was included in the Richard Dadd Exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1974, no. 60 (illus. in cat.).