Sold Works

Inscribed with colour notes l.r., signed with initials, inscribed and dated on reverse of original backing: Downstone Rock from Saugh Mill.Devon./JWA Septr. 21.1831,/No. 18., pen and grey ink and watercolour with gum arabic, on original washline mount21 x 16.7 cm; 8 ¼ x 6 ½ inchesProvenance : With Andrew Wyld, London; The Flannery collection, UK, and by descent until 2018.Abbott was one of the best amateur watercolourists of the late eighteenth century. An Exeter surgeon and apothecary, he lived in the city until 1825. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy from 1793 and received contemporary acclaim for the style of his work. The artist John Downman said that Abbott ‘prefers his drawings before his paintings, as they are done with more spirit’. 1In 1825 Abbott inherited Fordland, a Devon estate, from his uncle James White, an Exeter barrister and non-conformist, who was a close friend of Francis Towne. Abbott became a patron and pupil of Towne’s, and his linear style shows the artist’s influence. After he moved to Fordland, Abbott devoted himself to drawing.This view appears to show Dewerstone Rock seen from Shaugh Mill, near Shaugh Prior, on Dartmoor. Shaugh Mill was used for papermaking and stood by a stream of spring water. 2 In 1790 the papermaker was Richard Howard. It appears to have been a popular spot for artists to record, and was painted by J. F. Lewis and J. M. W. Turner amongst others. Another view by Abbott entitled Downstone Rock from a different aspect is in the collection of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.1. Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, republished 1978–1984; entry for 26 June 1804; vol. VI, p. 2362.2. A. H. Shorter and R. L. Hills, Studies on the History of Papermaking in Britain, 1993. I am grateful to April Marjoram for her comments about this view.

Inscribed verso: Near Low wood July 16/Evening light on the [?]position from the Right, signed with initials, inscribed and dated on label attached to backboard: On Winandermere [sic] near Lowwood./JWA. July 16.1791, pen and grey ink and watercolour, original hand drawn mount attached to backboard18.6 x 23.9 cm; 7½ x 9⅜ inchesProvenance: Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd, London, no. 14336; The Flannery collection, UK, and by descent until 2018.This drawing shows Windermere near Low Wood, drawn in a gentle evening light which catches on the trees; a building on the left with a boat moored in front of it and slates stacked up at the base of the tree on the right. It seems most probable that the building is the Low Wood Inn. Nine years later, Low Wood Bay is where Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journal begins (May 14 1800. Wm & John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at 1/2 past 2 o’clock – cold pork in their pockets. I left them at the turning of the Low-wood bay under the trees…).1From the end of the eighteenth century, the numerous slate quarries of the area had begun to increase production to supply the expanding industrial areas of the north of England. The slates would have been transported by boat, using craft like the one moored on the lake in this watercolour.John White Abbott was a surgeon and apothecary in Exeter for about twenty years. Drawing was his hobby, and he was the best-known pupil of Francis Towne (1739–1816). He exhibited oil paintings regularly from 1793 to 1805 at the Royal Academy as an honorary exhibitor (a nonprofessional artist). His uncle James White, an Exeter barrister and non-conformist, was a close friend of Towne’s and accompanied him on his Lake District tour of 1786.Abbott’s only known tour of any length outside Devon was to Scotland and the Lake District five years later. A series of eighty dated drawings from 13 June (York Minster) to 28 July (Glastonbury Abbey), record him in the Lakes during the second week of July 1791. He approached from the direction of Carlisle (7 July), spent two days around Ullswater, and was at Rydal on 10 July. After a couple of days in Grasmere and Windermere (12 July), he sketched in Borrowdale on 13 July before turning southwards, but was on Windermere again on 16 July, when the present work was drawn. Abbott travelled to Liverpool the following day and then on to the Peak District in Derbyshire, where he stayed from 21 to 23 July.Although it is not known exactly when Towne taught Abbott, it has been suggested that the two must have been in contact in the later part of the 1780s when Abbott was in his twenties, as the work Towne produced on his Lake District tour appears to have had a strong influence on Abbott’s early style, and on the work he drew during his own tour of the Lakes five years later. 2In 1825 Abbott inherited his uncle’s fortune and his property, Fordland, in Devon, and retired from the medical profession to devote himself exclusively to his painting, although he did not exhibit at the Royal Academy after 1822.1. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, republished 1987, p. 18.2. T. Wilcox, ‘Francis Towne and his friends’, exhibition catalogue, 2005, no. 29.

Inscribed l.l.: Fordland/June 5/1841, pen and grey ink and wash over traces of pencil26.5 x 21.5 cm.; 10 3/8 x 8 ½ inchesAbbott was one of the best amateur watercolorists of the late eighteenth century. An Exeter surgeon and apothecary, he lived in the city until 1825. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy from 1793 and received contemporary acclaim for the style of his work. The artist John Downman said that ‘he prefers his drawings before his paintings, as they are done with more spirit’ (J. Farington, Diary 26 June 1804; vol. VI, p. 2362).In 1825 the artist inherited the Devon estate of Fordland from his uncle James White a barrister and non-conformist. He delighted in drawing the woodland on his estate, developing the style he learnt from Francis Towne, his drawing master, with sophisticated handling of light and shade in the depiction of trees in monochrome.

KT442Pen and grey ink and grey washes24.8 x 31.5 cm.; 9 ¾ x 12 3/8 inchesProvenanceCyril and Shirley Fry until 2021A surgeon and apothecary in Exeter for about twenty years, drawing was John White Abbott’s hobby, and he was the best-known pupil of Francis Towne (1739-1816). He exhibited oil paintings regularly from 1793 to 1805 at the Royal Academy as an honorary exhibitor (a non-professional artist).Peamore is an historic country estate near Exeter where White Abbott and Towne made a number of watercolours. The present work has similarities with a drawing of the quarry at Peamore dated 1796 in the collection of the British Museum (2012,7037.1). The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, have a drawing of Peamore dating from 1802 with similar leaning trees.The Devon topographer Rev. John Swete wrote in 1789, ‘ the chief beauty of Peamore lies in the undulating form of its grounds, rising and falling in the regular alternation of hills and dales; in its woods, groves and trees and in a quarry which surrounded by a thicket of high towering oaks, beech, etc., is one of the grandest and most romantic objects in the country’ Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete, 1789–1800, edited by Todd Gray and Margery Rowe (Halsgrove, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 56.Peamore is about five miles south of Exeter and visitors and artists were permitted to explore its grounds. From 1774 until 1795 it belonged to the Coxe family until the death of Henry Hippisley Coxe when it was sold to Samuel Kekewich, in whose family it remained until 1947.In 1825 White Abbott inherited the Devon estate of Fordland from his uncle James White. He delighted in drawing the woodland on his estate, developing the style he learnt from Francis Towne his drawing master with sophisticated handling of light and shade in the depiction of trees in monochrome.

TreesDated l.r.: July 27. 1833, pen and grey ink and wash35 x 23.5 cmThis is a charming example of White Abbott’s celebrated and ‘modern’ style of drawing, with its use of clear pen and ink outline and flat washes, derived from the style of his teacher Francis Towne. A Devonian with a particular love of trees, the artist exhibited from time to time in London as an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts, but he never sold any of his work.This may well be a view of Fordland, the estate in Devon not far from Exeter which he inherited from his uncle James White, the lawyer and fellow pupil of Francis Towne, in 1825.White Abbott’s work can be found in many public collections, including the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Ashmolean, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

Inscribed verso: Nutwell.Oct.24th 1796, pen and grey ink and watercolour over traces of pencil11.2 x 18 cm.; 4 3/8 x 7 1/8 inchesProvenanceAbbot and Holder Ltd.;Private collection U.K. until 2024Abbott was one of the best amateur watercolourists of the late eighteenth century. A surgeon and apothecary, he lived in Exeter until 1825. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy from 1793, receiving contemporary acclaim for the style of his work which owes much to his teacher Francis Towne. The artist John Downman said that ‘he prefers his drawings before his paintings, as they are done with more spirit’ (J. Farington, Diary 26 June 1804; vol. VI, p. 2362).Nutwell Court is in east Devon near Lympstone overlooking the Exe estuary. Owned by Sir Francis Henry Drake, 5th Bt. (1723-1794) the estate was planted with fig trees in 1752, cedars in 1754, and laurels and evergreen oaks in 1755. By 1756 there were grape vines, a raspberry tree, a strawberry tree, a weeping willow, plane trees, cypresses, Newfoundland firs, larch trees, and a cistus. Further planting followed with black poplars, apricot trees, orange trees, Weymouth pines, myrtle and Scotch pines. Nutwell Court was built by 2nd Lord Heathfield (d. 1813) who discouraged visitors.

Inscribed beneath in brown ink: At Eastbourne 1848, watercolour over pencil with a brown line border, framed in a wooden moulding(Image) 12.5 x 20 cm; 4 7/8 x 7 3/4 inchesProvenanceSpink, 1980The Italian artist, born in Cremona, settled in England in 1803, having travelled in Greece and Egypt with William Wilkins, R.A.His work has often been confused with that of Constable, particularly his coastal views which look quite similar.Examples of his work may be found at the British Museum, the V & A, Brighton Art Gallery and in several other museum collections.

Signed with initials and dated l.r.: EA/1904, watercolour and bodycolour over traces of pencil on rough brown paperImage size 17.5 x 22.8 cm.; 6 7/8 x 9 inches, sheet size 22.5 x 27.5 cm.; 8 7/8 x 10 ¾ inchesFrame size 37.5 x 43 cm.; 14 ¾ x 16 7/8 inchesProvenancePrivate collection. U.K., until 2020Alexander studied at the Royal Institution, Edinburgh from 1887-8, and in Paris with the sculptor Emmanuel Frémier.In 1887-8 the artist travelled to Tangier with his father and fellow artists Pollock Nisbet and Joseph Crawhall. He returned to Egypt in 1892, after his artistic studies, and lived on a houseboat on the Nile for 4 years, painting in the desert. This drawing appears to be of North Africa, the evocative rooftops an engaging subject on the characteristic oatmeal paper he often used.In 1902 Alexander was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy becoming a full member in 1913. He exhibited widely including at the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Academy, Fine Art Society, Royal Watercolour Society and the Leicester Galleries.Alexander’s work is held in the Tate Gallery, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Dundee Art Gallery and by Fife Council.

KT455Auguste-Paul-Charles Anastasi (French 1820-1869)Etude de ciel, Le Berry, FranceOil on paper laid down on canvas, inscribed with title on studio sale label attached to stretcher: Etude de ciel/Berry, further inscribed on a second later label: ARTUS/99/Étude De Ciel, stamped with the artist’s seal on the stretcher24 x 38.5 cm.; 9 ½ x 15 ¼ inchesProvenanceThe artist’s studio sale, Durand-Ruel, 3 - 8 March 1873, no. 132;Private collection, France until 2021This sky study was done in the Berry region in the Loire Valley. Pin marks can be seen in the lower corners of the paper on which it is painted.The son of a painter of Greek origin, Auguste Paul Charles Anastasi was a pupil of Paul Delaroche and Camille Corot in Paris in the1840s. He began his career painting landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau, joining the Barbizon school group.Anastasi regularly exhibited at the Paris Salons in 1850s and 1860s, showing landscapes of the countryside around Paris, Normandy, the Roman Campagna and Naples. He also worked as an engraver. In 1870 Anastasi became blind.His work can be found in many museums including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and numerous French regional collections.

Signed and inscribed l.l.: S.R. Badmin/A wooded bank, inscribed with title and dated 1967 below the mount, watercolour over traces of pencil17.5 x 19.5 cm.; 6 7/8 x 7 ¾ inchesExhibitedRoyal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1967, no. 109Private collection, U.K. until 2024

Signed and dated l.l.: Ann Baring delt 1789, watercolour over pencil on laid paper watermarked with the Strasburg Lily34.8 x 47.9 cm; 13 5/8 x 18 7/8 inchesProvenancePrivate collection, U.K., until 2019This charming work shows Ann Baring’s watercolour style as similar to that of her fellow Devonian Francis Towne and she may be presumed to have been one of his pupils. The watercolour shows several similarities to Towne’s work, especially the trees in shade immediately above the white cow, and the figure and his donkey crossing the bridge. This would appear to be a composition drawn from elements learned from Towne. The strong shadow cast by the tree trunk in the right, and the fussy foreground plants in the bottom right corner are also characteristic of this kind of Towne. She is also known to have painted oils.Ann Baring, who lived in Devon all her life, was the daughter of John Baring, (1730-1816) of Mount Radford House, Devon, an English merchant banker and M.P. and the eldest son of Johann Baring (1697–1748), a clothier from Bremen in Germany who had settled in Exeter, where he built up a large business and obtained English citizenship. Her mother was Ann Parker, the daughter of Francis Parker of Blagdon near Paignton in Devon. She is known to have worked in Ireland as well as Devon. A Miss Baring commissioned a watercolour from Towne of Lago Maggiore in 1781 (Tate Gallery, Francis Towne online catalogue FT 350).After John Baring’s father's death in 1748, he inherited the large family cloth business in Exeter. Together with his younger brother Francis, he extended his commercial interests to London and set up the partnership of John and Francis Baring, of which he was the senior partner. He soon retired from activity in London for Devon and left the running of the London business to Francis, under whose guidance it evolved into Barings Bank. In 1802, Barings and Hope & Co. were called on to facilitate the largest land purchase in history, the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the area of the USA.John Baring founded banks in Plymouth and Exeter and was elected Member of Parliament for Exeter in 1776. He was also appointed Sheriff of Devon for 1776. He retired from Parliament in 1802. His daughter Ann had three sisters, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Margaret and two brothers.The Baring daughters and their cousins were prominent in Exeter society and were known in the circle that included Towne’s friends and customers. In 1786 Ann’s sister Charlotte married John Short of Bickham, one of Towne’s patrons (see FT240), and in 1790 Frances, daughter of Charles Baring, married William (see FT876), the son of Towne’s musician friend William Jackson, whose house, Cowley Place, was very near to Barton Place. In 1791 Frances’s sister Jaquetta married Sir Stafford Northcote of Pynes, another nearby estate where Towne had sketched (FT143). Charles Baring’s daughter Lucy was a close friend of Frances, daughter of John Merivale, Towne’s major patron, and after Lucy’s death in 1815 Frances married her widower, John Lewis Mallet of the Audit Office.I am grateful to Richard Stephens for his comments on this watercolour.

Signed, inscribed and dated l.l.: Reginald Barrett./Gwalior./1911, watercolour over traces of pencil, in a gilt frame23.4 x 15.8 cm.; 9 ¼ x 6 ¼ inchesFrame size 38 x 29 cm.; 14 7/8 x 11 ½ inchesProvenanceHartnoll and Eyre;Private collection, U.K. until 2020Barrett was a painter of landscapes and architectural subjects. He had been articled to the architect Norman Shaw and then studied in Paris under Lefèbvre and Bouguereau. He worked as an illustrator for The Graphic and The Daily Graphic. He was an inveterate traveller in the Middle East and Italy and was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint her favourite view in Florence. From 1885 he exhibited at the Royal Academy, New Watercolour Society and New Gallery, becoming AWRS in 1901 and RWS in 1913. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.Barrett’s one-man shows A Collection of Watercolour Drawings Illustrating India and Egypt was held at the Fine Art Society in 1894 and Watercolours of India at the Leicester Galleries, London in 1912.The fort at Gwalior was the favourite building of Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India.

Signed and dated l.r.: Edward Bawden/1948, pen and grey ink and watercolour46 x 59 cm.; 18 x 23 inchesProvenanceMiss N.B. Allen, purchased in 1949 from the Leicester Galleries, London;Spink, K3 10536;Private collection, U.K. until 2022ExhibitedLeicester Galleries, London: ‘Works by Edward Bawden CBE, ARA’, February 1949, no. 1Bawden lived in Great Bardfield in Essex from the 1930s to 1970 and was a central figure of the Great Bardfield Artists.

Signed l.r., watercolour28 x 12 cm

Signed l.r.: C. Bentley, watercolour over traces of pencilProvenanceL.G. Duke; Spink & Son. Ltd.

Watercolour over pencil14.5 x 12.7 cm; 53⁄4 x 5 inches Provenance: Paul F. Walter, until 2017This is an unusual example of a shop interior by Mary Ellen Best, whose remarkable work came to public attention in the 1980s when Sotheby’s handled a large group of her drawings and Caroline Davidson published her monograph on the artist. Best’s main interest lay in portraying domestic interiors and domestic workers. Born in York she drew the interiors of her own home and after marrying Johann Sarg, a school master, she moved to Darmstadt in Germany and continued to paint. From the summer of 1841 the Sargs lived in Frankfurt, in a house on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse. The birth of Mary Ellen’s children greatly reduced her artistic activity.Examples of Bests’s work, which she exhibited in her own lifetime in York, London, Liverpool and Leeds can be found in numerous international private collections and York City Art Gallery.Paul Walter (1825–2017) was the son of Fred and Anna Walter, co-founders of the New Jersey industrial instruments firm Thermo Electric. A respected connoisseur, he supported the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York over many years.

Signed and dated l.r.: F. Blake 1849, inscribed on original mount in pencil: And on the darkest clouds of woe/he sets his covenanted bow/Patterdale, inscribed on original backboard in ink: Patterdale Churchyard by F. Blake and Blake 3665, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out, a Vokins framing stamp on the backboard, a label inscribed Drawing Room attached to the backboardProvenanceBy descent in the Blake family to Major-General Mark Bond, OBE (1922-2017), Moigne Combe, Dorset;By family descent at Moigne Combe until 2019Fanny (Frances) Blake was the sister of Frederick Rudolph Blake of Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the great-grandfather of H.M.G. Bond and E.M.G. Williams.She was an extremely talented pupil of Peter de Wint and is singled out for special mention in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ of 1851, in a review of an exhibition of the work of amateur watercolorists as an ‘accomplished artist, admirable for truth, completeness and delicacy’.This watercolour is a record of the previous church of St Patrick at Patterdale which dated from the 14th century and was extensively rebuilt around 1620, known to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Turner. A new church was built at Patterdale by Salvin in the early 1850s after a storm destroyed the building depicted here. The ancient yew tree in this work, thought to have dated back to the Norman Conquest, was destroyed in a storm in 1883.

Pen and brown ink and grey wash on laid paper partially watermarked with the Strasburg Lily, the backing paper numbered 8, inscribed on reverse of backing paper by L.G.Duke: D938 D/L.P. Boitard/LGD and numbered 4 in ink in another hand19 x 12.7 cm.; 7 ½ × 5 inchesProvenanceColnaghi (part of an album of 65 drawings by Boitard);Leonard G. Duke (1890-1971);Squire Gallery, purchased from the above March 1948;Arnold Fellows, no. 72;Bequeathed by him to Queen Mary's Grammar School, Walsall;Sold by a charitable trust, 2023The artist was an engraver, designer and illustrator from Paris who lived most of his life in London. He was the son of designer François Boitard (1667-1719).A distinctive line and a sense of humor characterises his work which often features mildly satirical drawings of ordinary people.This drawing comes from an album of 65 works by the artist once owned by Leonard G. Duke, the eminent collector, who bought it from Colnaghi and split it up.Arnold Fellows was a pupil at Queen Mary's Grammar School, Walsall, between 1911 and 1917. He became a master of the school for a brief period, before moving to spend the remainder of his life as a teacher at Chigwell School in Essex. Fellows devoted much of his life to collecting art, notably works on paper, and eventually donated his entire collection to his old school. He was the author of The wayfarer's companion : England's history in her buildings and countryside, published by Oxford University Press, 1937.

Pen and brown ink and watercolour on laid paper, numbered 29 on old mount, inscribed with initials and artist’s name by L.G.Duke verso17.8 x 11.9 cm; 7 x 4 3/4 inchesProvenanceL.G. Duke, no. DG38HThe artist was an engraver, designer and illustrator from Paris who lived most of his life in London. He was the son of designer François Boitard (1667-1719). His distinctive line and sense of humour characterises his work which often features mildly satirical drawings of ordinary people.This drawing comes from an album of works by the artist once owned by Leonard G. Duke, the eminent collector.

Alice Boyd (1823-1897)Capella di S. Clemente, S. Marco, VeniceInscribed and dated l.r.: Capella di S. Clemente S. Marco/21 June 1873., watercolour over pencil with touches of white35.3 x 25.5 cm.; 13 7/8 x 10 inchesThe artist painted this subject in oil, recorded in Ellen C. Clayton, English Female Artists, London 1876, Vol. 2, p. 41.From 26 May to 6 July 1873 Alice travelled through Europe with Bell Scott, his wife Letitia, William Michael Rossetti and Lucy Madox Brown. Their tour started in Chambéry, France and continued through Italy where they stopped in Venice on their way home.William Bell Scott drew a similar view in pencil from a slightly different angle, entitled The Interior of St Marks, now in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland (D4715.28B).

Signed with monogram l.r., watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out, touches of bodycolour and white25 x 35 cm.; 9 7/8 x 13 ¾ inchesThis romantic landscape is probably a view near Penkill Castle, a few miles northeast of Girvan in south Ayrshire which the artist inherited in 1865. She and her lover William Bell Scott spent their summers at Penkill, the castle perched on a promontory overlooking Penwhapple burn. The nearby Firth of Clyde was visible from the castle battlements.

Signed with monogram l.r. and dated July 1875, watercolour over pencil with scratching out, the original mount inscribed: Steps to the Studio, Penkill/Steps that lead to pleasant days/And work that needs nor blame nor praise, in the original reeded frame31 x 22.2 cm.; 12 ½ x 8 5/8 inchesProvenanceBonhams London, 31 March 2021, lot 33Alice Boyd was one of the most talented women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In March 1859 she became a pupil of William Bell Scott who was Master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle. Her work has traditionally been overshadowed by Scott’s.Boyd and Scott fell in love, and, with his wife Letitia, divided their time between Penkill and the Scott's London home, living in a menage à trois.He first visited the ancestral home she shared with her brother Spencer Boyd in July 1860. In 1865, following Spencer’s death, Alice became laird of Penkill, the romantic castle perched on a promontory overlooking the Penwhapple burn five miles from Girvan in Ayrshire.Boyd painted several watercolours and oils outside her studio in the grounds of Penkill. She converted part of the stable block into a studio for herself and Bell Scott to use during the summer. The inscription on the original mount of the present work: Steps to the Studio, Penkill/Steps that lead to pleasant days/And work that needs nor blame nor praise, reflects a happy and productive working environment. The elaborately drawn peacock and roses and foliage, reminiscent of William Morris wallpaper, bear testament to the emerging Aesthetic movement.Boyd and Bell Scott entertained other members of the Pre-Raphaelite group at Penkill, and it was here that Dante Gabriel Rossetti found some solace in his most bleak moments of melancholia. The Penwhapple Burn inspired his poem The Stream's Secret, begun when he was staying at Penkill in 1869.His sister Christina delighted in the views of Ailsa Craig and the Clyde from the window in her turret bedroom and Alma-Tadema showered every morning in the freezing torrents of the Penwhapple waterfall. William Holman Hunt sent souvenirs to Penkill as gifts for Alice, Arthur Hughes was a frequent visitor and William Morris is believed to have designed four embroidered panels which hung in the passage from the banqueting hall. Penkill has been described as having a 'relaxed atmosphere of art and animals, whisky, friends and endless talk' (Country Life, 21 March 1991, p. 118).Penkill was a centre of the Pre-Raphaelites until 1885 when Bell Scott had an angina attack and was almost bedridden until his death five years later. Alice lived there for another seven years.Christie’s sold many of the contents on 15 December 1991 and the castle is now a private residence.

Watercolour17 x 24.6 cm.; 6 33/4 x 9 ¾ inchesProvenancePietro Raffo until 2022£3200Brabazon greatly admired the work of J.M.W.Turner. This is a copy after a watercolour in the Turner Bequest (D32168 TB CCCXVI 31). It is thought to show shipping moored off the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore or the Riva degli Schiavoni, Venice, done in 1840. Ian Warrell has suggested that it is part of a group which probably derived from Canaletto’s Bacino compositions (I. Warrell, Turner and Venice, 2003, p. 47). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmw-turner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-shipping-moored-off-the-isola-di-san-giorgio-maggiore-or-the-r1196999Brabazon captures the spirit of Turner’s watercolour rather successfully. Given that Turner was influenced in turn by Canaletto, this watercolour attests to the hold which Venice has had over artists through the ages.

Watercolour with touches of white over pencil on blue paper14 x 17.3 cmThe second son of Hercules Sharpe, the artist was educated at Harrow. After leaving Cambridge, where he read mathematics, he decided to become an artist and studied in Rome for three years. On the death of his elder brother he inherited the Brabazon name and estates in Ireland. He spent his summers in England and his winters travelling in Europe and, from the 1860s, further afield. In 1891 Sargent persuaded him to have an exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, and as a result in his old age he was at the forefront of the modern movement.He was most influenced by Turner, Cox, Müller and de Wint, and his style owes much to Turner’s late work. Turner drew several views of Luxembourg on his Meuse–Moselle tour of 1839, and a watercolour from a similar viewpoint is in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain (TB CCXXX1 0), although it is unlikely that Brabazon would have seen this work.

Second Cataract, Wady HalfahExtensively inscribed with colour notes, Second cataract/929 miles south of Alexandria/Wady Halfah end of journey and dated Feb 6 1874, water colour and pencil, stamped with atelier stamp9.5 x 15.5 cm

Inscribed and dated l.l.: Tombs of the Kings Thebes/15 Jan 1847 and stamped with atelier stamp inscribed and dated NICE 1954, watercolour over pencil9.5 x 15 cm

North-East view of Lyte’s Carey, Somerset and South view of Lyte’s Carey, Somerset A pair, each signed and dated l.r.: J.C. Buckler 1834, each inscribed with title on mount, pen and grey ink and grey wash over traces of pencil, in period burr maple frames stamped JB180 and JB186Each 30 x 38 cm; 11 3/4 x 15 inchesProvenanceHartnoll and EyreThe artist was an architect, the eldest son of the architect John Buckler, who drew Lyte’s Carey and the nearby church in 1834. A pair of unsigned sepia sketches of the same views, probably studies for the present works, hang at the house. These crisp works are typical of his meticulous draftsmanship and attention to architectural detail.Buckler specialised in the restoration of country houses, rebuilding Costessey Hall, Norfolk in 1825-6, a project acclaimed as an important instance of Gothic Revival in domestic architecture by Charles Locke Eastlake. In 1836 he came second in the competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire. He also completed a number of restoration projects in parish churches including St Mary’s, Adderbury, Oxfordshire, St Nicholas’, Old Shoreham, West Sussex, St Mary’s, Steeple Barton, Oxfordshire and others.Buckler worked at a number of Oxford colleges, notably Brasenose, Oriel, Magdelen and Jesus and at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. He also restored Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, Hengrave Hall, Suffolk, and designed Butleigh Court in Somerset in 1845 and Dunston Hall, Norfolk from 1859.

Pen and grey ink and watercolour over traces of pencil, inscribed verso: Talleyrand15 x 13.5 cm.; 5 7/8 x 5 1/4 inchesFrame size 31.5 x 26.5 cm; 12 ¼ x 10 3/8 inchesProvenanceCyril and Shirley Fry collectionThis sketch of the great statesman would appear to have been drawn between 1830 - 1834, during Talleyrand's time as French Ambassador to the Court of St James's.

Signed or inscribed l.l.: W Callow, inscribed l.c.: Le Forum/prise de l’arc de Constantin/26 Sept 40, watercolour over pencil on buff paper24.5 x 36 cm; 9 5/8 x 14 1/4 inchesProvenanceMrs Callow;Walker Gallery;Albany Gallery, from where purchased by the present owner;Private collection, U.K.Callow made his first trip to Italy in 1840 and spent ten days sketching in Rome, when the present work was done. Like many artists he was strongly affected by the country and his Italian views were to become some of his most popular subjects.This drawing is inscribed in French, like other drawings of the period, as Callow had been living in France since 1829. He had obtained great success and royal patronage there and in 1840 he was awarded the gold medal at the Paris Salon. He received commissions for five large watercolours from Marie Amélie, the Duc de Nemours and his pupil Princess Clémentine after they inspected his Italian sketches at the Tuileries Palace. He enjoyed much royal favour but the political instability in France and the prospect of Louis Philippe’s abdication caused him to return to England in March 1841 (see Jan Reynolds, William Callow, 1980, pp. 76-77).It has been suggested that the signature may have been added by Callow’s wife at a later date. A similar drawing of the Ponte Cartro, Rome dated 28 September is in the collection of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

Signed and dated l.r.: Wm Callow/1870, watercolour over pencil with scratching out37 x 27 cm; 14½ x 10⅝ inchesExhibited: The Society of Painters in Water-colours, 1870, The Piazzetta, Venice.This engaging watercolour shows the famous statues of the Lion of St Mark and St Theodore in the Piazzetta, which Callow draws teeming with life. A gondolier looking for business can be seen to the left of the composition while a lady in a red cloak and white shawl is in deep conversation with a soldier in the foreground, evoking characteristically Venetian pursuits.Venice was Callow’s inspiration and he returned to the city throughout his life, always staying at the Hotel Europa facing the Grand Canal. Another watercolour of the Piazzetta dated 1877 is in the collection of the city of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (1953P51).

Signed and dated l.l.: Wm Callow/1885., watercolour over pencil with scratching out and touches of white37.4 x 26.7 cm; 14¾ x 10½ inchesExhibited: Probably the Society of Painters in Water-colours, 1885, entitled A Relic of Venetian Architecture in Padua.This colourful drawing shows the triple-arched Venetian Gothic window of the Palazzo di Ezzolino in the centre of Padua, above an archway over a busy thoroughfare bustling with locals shopping. The palace was built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Ezzelino da Romano. A further view of Padua by Callow showing the Market Place and Palazzo Ragione is in the collection of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.

Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: VENICE Wm Callow/1857., watercolour over traces of pencil heightened with touches of white24 x 32.2 cm; 9 3/8 x 12 5/8 inchesProvenanceLeger Galleries, 1962;Private collection, by descent until 2018ExhibitedSociety of Painters in Water-Colours, London, 1857;Leger Galleries, 1962LiteratureH.M. Cundall (Ed), William Callow R.W.S. An Autobiography, London, 1908, p. 154Venice was Callow’s inspiration and he returned to the city many times after his first visit in 1840. This viewpoint is taken from the Dogana looking north-west across the mouth of the Grand Canal towards the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Square.This work dates from the 1850s when his work was particularly finely drawn and he handled detail with great delicacy.

Signed with monogram l.l., red chalk on wove paper41.8 x 35 cm; 16⅜ x 13¾ inchesPrivate collection, U.K., until 2020Alice Mary Chambers was a talented and well-connected artist associated with Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, whose career and family ties have so far been overlooked. A notable figure in the late nineteenth century British art world, Chambers exhibited her work in many major galleries including the Royal Academy, was a close friend of the collector Charles Augustus Howell and gave Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s plaster death mask to the National Portrait Gallery.Chambers was born in Harlow, Essex in 1854 or 1855. Her father Charles Chambers (1817–1874), vicar of St Mary’s, Harlow, was a significant figure in the ritualist or AngloCatholic movement, her mother Mary Upton (c.1815–1873) the daughter of a Sedbergh cotton merchant. Orphaned by their death within a year of each other in 1873–4 she was able to complete her studies in art. The 1881 census records Chambers as an artist in drawing and painting, living at 17 Red Lion Square in the house which had been previously lived in by William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones and where Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. had their first headquarters.Chambers was a direct contemporary of Evelyn De Morgan, Kate Bunce and Marianne Stokes and like them, the Pre-Raphaelite influence on her work was profound. She was a friend of the collector Charles Augustus Howell and through him met other artists such as Whistler (see McClean, op cit. p. 77). Howell was Ruskin’s secretary from 1865–70, and a close friend of Algernon Swinburne,the Burne-Joneses and Whistler. Howell famously oversaw the exhumation of Lizzie Siddal’s coffin to recover Rossetti’s manuscript poems in 1869 and was rumoured to have overseen the forgery of various paintings with the help of his lover, the artist Rosa Corder. When the collector Samuel Wreford Paddon sued Howell for fraud, Chambers and Corder provided promissory notes to help settle the claim. On Howell’s death in 1890 he named Chambers as an executor and trustee of his will and a guardian of hisdaughter Rosalind and she made the arrangements for his funeral and the sale of his estate.Chambers exhibited nine works at the Royal Academy between 1883 and 1893. Her work included such titles as Cydippe, Psyche, A Priestess of Ceres, Nancy, An Egyptian Fellah Woman, Relentless Memory and During the Prelude. She exhibited Daphne in 1892 at the New Gallery; the catalogue described it as a ‘little upright picture of a maiden penetrating with closed eyes throughdense laurel thicket’ (New Gallery 7). She showed During the Prelude and Home through the wood: Brittany, at the Autumn 1894 exhibition of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (Royal Society 35, 55). She exhibited work at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the Manchester City Art Gallery. She also provided the frontispiece illustration for Mary Hullah’s The Lion Battalion (1885), a collection of stories for children.She specialized in drawings of female figures and mythological and orientalist subjects, and favoured red chalk and her monogram is reminiscent of that of Rossetti. She often used a leafy backdrop, as in the present work (not unlike the famous Morris wallpaper Willow Boughs) which can also be seen in her lithograph of the actress of the silent screen Mary Anderson and a similar drawing of a woman with her hair up and with plants in the background which was sold at Christies, London (10 March 1995, lot 134).Chambers appears to have moved again in London and led quite a peripatetic life spending time in Spain and France and was living in Sussex by 1911. In 1913 she donated Rossetti’s plaster death mask to the National Portrait Gallery.I am most grateful to Thomas McLean for his helpful comments on this drawing; see ‘Family Portraits: The Life and Art of Alice Mary Chambers’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Number 133, Summer 2018, pp. 69–83 https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2018.0006

Signed and dated l.r.: N. Chevalier/1887., watercolour over pencil with scratching out36 x 48.5 cm.; 14 1/8 x 19 1/8 inchesProvenancePrivate collection, U.K. until 2023Born in St Petersburg of a Swiss father and Russian mother, Chevalier moved to Switzerland in 1845 where he studied at the drawing academy affiliated with the Musée Arlaud in Lausanne before studying architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He travelled to London in 1851 to see the Great Exhibition, where he also trained as a lithographer and exhibited watercolours at the Royal Academy.Chevalier arrived in Melbourne in 1854 and found employment on the magazine Melbourne Punch. Alongside his work as a commercial illustrator he also published in 1865 a portfolio of 12 landscape prints, the earliest examples of chromolithography in Australia. Chevalier visited New Zealand in 1865–66, making extensive records of his tour, which he exhibited in Christchurch and Dunedin and in Melbourne at the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866–67, as well as at the Paris Salon in 1868.When Queen Victoria’s second son, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived in Melbourne in 1867 as part of his world tour, Chevalier accompanied the royal party as correspondent for The Illustrated Australian News. Later, he was invited to join the Duke’s entourage for the voyage back to England. His sketches and watercolours documenting the journey were exhibited at the Crystal Palace and at the South Kensington Museum in 1872.After settling in London in 1870, Chevalier received numerous commissions from the royal family. He also travelled routinely to Switzerland to paint. His influence on the development of the fine arts in Australia remained strong.Towards the end of his life Chevalier spent his winters in Madeira, where his final watercolours were made. This view shows Loo Rock in Funchal Bay and gives an evocative sense of the terraces of the city in the late 1880s.

Inscribed l.r.: Buah Nam nam./Cynometra cauliflora. and with further botanical notes in Latin, Jawi and Greek, watercolour and bodycolour over traces of pencil with gum arabic, on laid paper watermarked: RUSE & TURNERS/1825 and with the Strasburg Lily37.5 x 48.5 cm; 14 3/4 x 19 1/4 inchesBuah Nam is a member of the family Fabaceae (legumes) native to Malaysia, a small, cauliflorous tree with a thick, heavily branched stem, and rather small flowers, about 1.2 cm across, that appear on the stem in clusters. The pod is edible with aromatic, juicy yellow pulp and large seeds.ProvenanceSharon and Anne Hamlyn until 2019These fine examples of watercolours by Chinese Artists of the Straits School are in the style of the Chinese artists who worked for Sir Stamford Raffles in Singapore and Major-General William Farquhar (c.1771-1839) who was Resident of Malacca from 1808-1818. The frequent movements of trade and personnel between India and China, via ports on the Malay peninsula including Malacca and Prince of Wales Island, meant that collectors frequently had both Indian and Chinese drawings in their collections. Henry Noltie has suggested that this school is named ‘Straits School’ (see Forgotten Masters Indian Painting for the East India Company, ed. W. Dalrymple, 2019, pp. 78-82).British patrons commissioned local Chinese artists to draw the flora and fauna of Malacca and the extensive botanical annotations in Jawi, the Malay script derived from Arabic, Romanised Malay, Latin and Greek and with reference to the Linnaean system of classification, created by Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) are typical of this material.The accumulation of natural history drawings by officials of the British East India Company gave rise to the term ‘Company School’, now out of favour, which has been used to describe the work of Indian or Chinese artists for British patrons. The distinctive style is a result of a fusion of two artistic traditions, the European with its desire for realism and the Asian taste for a more stylised approach.The eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw an enormous rise of interest in Europe in the study of natural history by both scientists and amateurs. A knowledge of the subject was considered to be an important part of a liberal education and many people studied ‘natural philosophy’ and the various branches of natural history. Accurate drawings were vital tools in classification as well as a reminder of the excited reaction to new discoveries.

Inscribed l.r.: Buah rambootan./Nephelium lappaceum./Monaecia pentandria L. and with further botanical notes, watercolour and bodycolour over traces of pencil with gum arabic, on laid paper watermarked: RUSE & TURNERS/1825 and with the Strasburg Lily38.2 x 48.7 cm; 15 x 19 inchesProvenanceSharon and Anne Hamlyn until 2019These fine examples of watercolours by Chinese Artists of the Straits School are in the style of the Chinese artists who worked for Sir Stamford Raffles in Singapore and Major-General William Farquhar (c.1771-1839) who was Resident of Malacca from 1808-1818. The frequent movements of trade and personnel between India and China, via ports on the Malay peninsula including Malacca and Prince of Wales Island, meant that collectors frequently had both Indian and Chinese drawings in their collections. Henry Noltie has suggested that this school is named ‘Straits School’ (see Forgotten Masters Indian Painting for the East India Company, ed. W. Dalrymple, 2019, pp. 78-82).British patrons commissioned local Chinese artists to draw the flora and fauna of Malacca and the extensive botanical annotations in Jawi, the Malay script derived from Arabic, Romanised Malay, Latin and Greek and with reference to the Linnaean system of classification, created by Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) are typical of this material.The accumulation of natural history drawings by officials of the British East India Company gave rise to the term ‘Company School’, now out of favour, which has been used to describe the work of Indian or Chinese artists for British patrons. The distinctive style is a result of a fusion of two artistic traditions, the European with its desire for realism and the Asian taste for a more stylised approach.The eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw an enormous rise of interest in Europe in the study of natural history by both scientists and amateurs. A knowledge of the subject was considered to be an important part of a liberal education and many people studied ‘natural philosophy’ and the various branches of natural history. Accurate drawings were vital tools in classification as well as a reminder of the excited reaction to new discoveries.

Signed l.l.: E.W. Cooke RA./14 Oc4.1877, inscribed below and above with locations, pencil15.8 x 26.8 cm; 6 ¼ x 10 ½ inchesEdward William Cooke spent ten seasons in Venice from 1850-1877, entranced by the city’s architecture like so many artists before and after him. Rowed by his gondolier, Vincenzo Grilla, Cooke found innumerable subjects to explore. As John Munday observes, ‘What marine painter, worth his salt, could ignore the call of the Serenissima? Certainly not Edward Cooke, for her waterways fringed by palaces and churches of a unique style reflecting moving colour and light were thronged by a fascinating variety of working craft. Further, the islands in the lagoons were set against a mountainous backdrop and were subject to atmospheric effects which could be theatrical. What more, to his taste, could any place offer?’ (John Munday, Edward William Cooke: 1811-1880, Woodbridge 1996, p. 151).Cooke’s views of Venice earned the enthusiastic praise of his contemporaries, including John Ruskin.The Royal Academy, London has a collection of Cooke’s pencil sketches which illustrate in depth the quality of his draughtsmanship.

Richard Cosway (1742-1821)A lady playing a keyboard wearing sixteenth century dress, 1785-1790Pen and brown ink on watermarked laid paper, on the original wash-line mount14 x 15.2 cm.; 5 ½ x 6 inchesFramed size 36.5 x 36.5 cm.; 14 3/8 x 14 3/8 inchesProvenanceTimothy Clowes until 2020LiteratureG. Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway, London 1995, fig. 38This lively drawing dates from 1785-1790 when Cosway was experimenting with 16th and 17th century costumes and role-playing. The sitter is one of the artist’s models.

Boats off CologneSigned and dated l.r.: .S Cotman 1832, numbered and inscribed verso: 14 Boats off Cologne, watercolour over pencil with scratching out23.2 x 32.6 cmProvenanceBaron François Adolphe Akermann, régent of the Banque de France and his wife Louise Marie née Boquet de Saint-Simon, the Chateau de Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe, France, by descent until 2018The Great Saint Martin church, Cologne can be seen from the Rhine. In the late 18th century the northwestern tower was taken down and Cotman’s drawing shows the church with only two towers on the east side. After the twenty year occupation of the city from 1794 by the French, the archbishopric was ended in 1801 and the cloister at Saint Martin’s disbanded in 1802. The deserted abbey was lived in by French veterans and was later demolished.The two missing towers of the church were finally rebuilt in 1875.This drawing, which has not been on the market since the time of its creation, comes from a friendship album started by Baron Akermann (1809-1890) for his wife Louise Marie Bouqet de Saint-Simon after their marriage in 1836. There was a vogue for such albums in the nineteenth century and visitors would bring a drawing or watercolour as a symbol of friendship or to commemorate a visit. The magnificent leather bound album album contained an unmounted group of drawings and watercolours by artists such as Richard Parkes Bonington, Francia, William Wyld, Decamps, Vernet, Granville, Garneray, Coignet and others. The subjects ranged from marines to genre scenes, landscapes, still lives and interiors.Baron François Adolphe Ackerman (1809-1890) was born in Paris and followed his grandfather and father into the world of finance becoming receveur général des Finances for the department of the Dordogne in 1834 at the age of twenty five. He was an able financier and rebuilt the family estate at Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe also becoming mayor of Rahay. He became deputy governor of the Banque de France in December 1870 and régent of the Banque de France on 27 January 1871, holding the office until his death. He was painted by Winterhalter. He and his wife had two daughters one of whom, Henrietta, married vicomte Henri de Bouillé.His grand father André Joseph Bernard Ackerman (1743-1824) was receveur general des finances of Namur and his father François Joseph Ackerman (1772-1833) held the same office for the department of Sambre-et-Meuse (1808-1814) and Ardennes (1815-1833).

Watercolour over traces of pencil, inscribed in a later hand on old mount: North side of South Gate-Yarmouth, taken down in 1812. John Sell Cotman/ EXHIB 1812?18.5 x 22.7 cm.; 7 ¼ x 8 15/16 inchesProvenanceMrs Craig Henderson, her sale, Christie’s, London, 24 October1960, (part) lot 56, bt. Spink;Mr & Mrs Giles Pilcher until 1987;With Agnew’s, London, 1992;Private collection until 2004;With W/S Fine Art;Private collection until 2018;With Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, 2019;Private collection, U.K. until 2024ExhibitedProbably Norwich Society of Artists, 1812, no. 63;Agnew’s, 119th Annual Exhibition of English Watercolours and drawings, 1992, no. 35;W/S Fine Art (Andrew Wyld), Landscape on Paper, June 2007, no. 23;Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, British Drawings and Watercolours, 2019,no. 25EngravedEtched by Cotman as the last plate in Specimens of Norman and Gothic Architecture in the County of Norfolk, 1817Cotman and his family moved to Yarmouth in April 1812 on the suggestion of Dawson Turner (1775-1858), his friend and patron. They lived at Bank House, Southtown, a mile from the centre of the town until 1823 when they returned to Norwich. The South Gate was destroyed later in 1812. There is a finished pencil drawing by Cotman of the subject in the Norwich Castle collection numbered 2363. https://www.museumscollections.norfolk.gov.uk/collections-object-page?id=NWHCM%20:%201932.105.25In this atmospheric watercolour which is in exceptional condition, Cotman focuses his artistic attention on the massive body of the gatehouse, skilfully exploring the textures of the stone walls and the interplay of light, shade and colour using a restricted palette. He has deliberately focused on the gate and left the cottages in the foreground lightly washed in without adding further details. The delicately drawn masts of a couple of ships to the right of the tower allude to the proximity of the sea.The subject became well known through the popular etching produced in 1817 for Specimens of Norman and Gothic Architecture in the county of Norfolk. There is greater architectural detail in the print which is closer to the pencil drawing.

Signed and inscribed l.l.: ?H….s Oak, W(?)…Forest June ME Cotman, pencil24.5 x 34 cm.; 9 5/8 x 13 3/8 inchesOak trees were a subject frequently drawn by J.S. Cotman and Miles Edmund. It has been suggested that this tree bears a resemblance to Kett’s Oak near Wymondham.

Signed l.l.: M E Cotman/April 23 1827, inscribed l.r.: Raby Park Durham/E of Darlingtons, pencil34.5 x 24 cm.; 13 ½ x 9 3/8 inchesProvenanceDr Henry Lowe and Judy Lowe (née) Cotman until 2023

Inscribed verso: At Dulwich, sepia wash15.5 x 11.3 cm.; 6 1/8 x 4 3/8 inchesThis drawing was executed while Cox was living in Dulwich between 1809 - 1813, in the house beside the windmill on Dulwich Common.ExhibitedDulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Bicentenary Exhibition’, catalogue no. 4;Dulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Dulwich Past and Present’, summer 1993ProvenanceThe Carnegie family;By descent to Lord Rosehill;Anthony Reed, English Drawings and Paintings, Cork Street, London W1;Sotheby’s, 1 April 1993, lot 75;Barbara Brind;By descent until 2022

Watercolour over pencil21 x 29.8 cm; 8¼ x 11¾ inchesProvenanceJohn Manning Ltd, London.This watercolour shows the main gatehouse of Raglan Castle, largely built by William ap Thomas in the mid fifteenth century. Raglan is not far from Hereford, Cox’s home for many years, and the artist drew several watercolours of the castle, one of which, a distant view of the ruin, was engraved by J. H. Clark.

Watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour on‘Scotch’ paper, inscribed on old mount: ‘Vale of Dolwyddelan N.W.’21 x 29cmProvenanceSotheby’s, 25 November 1999, lot 70;Professor Anthony Bryer, 1999-2017Cox painted Wales throughout his life but from 1842 his annual visits to North Wales and Betws-y-Coed became central to his oeuvre. He exhibited views of the Vale of Dolwyddelan in 1846, 1847 and 1851. His love for the wild and beautiful scenery of the area inspired his work and the present watercolour captures the drama of the landscape with the characteristic bravura of Cox’s later drawings.

Signed l.r.: D. COX., watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and touches of gum arabic21.3 x 34 cm.; 8 3/8 x 13 3/8 inchesProvenanceGuy D. Harvey-Samuel (1887-1960);Fine Art Society, Annual Exhibition of English Drawings and Watercolours, April 1960; no. 108;Private collection, U.K. until 2020This sparkling watercolour in superb condition and dating from circa 1824 is a fine example of the fluent small-scale drawings with which Cox had commercial success in the mid to late 1820s.He wrote to William Radclyffe that he intended to devote more time to saleable smaller works, as his larger pictures were not finding buyers (Scott Wilcox points out that his discovery of the elegant small watercolours by Bonington at this date would have provided a compelling model (See Scott Wilcox, ed., Sun, Wind, and Rain: The Art of David Cox, exhibition catalogue, Yale Centre for British Art, p. 36).Cox drew several versions of this view; the closest to this one is a slightly larger drawing in the British Museum (1915,0313.6). Another version was engraved by William Radclyffe as plate XI in Thomas Roscoe’sWanderings and Excursions in South Wales in 1837 in which agricultural labourers and their horses replace the sheep and cattle in the foreground. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery have a slightly smaller version with sheep in the foreground (1927P678 and see David Cox, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 2008-9, no. 31).

Signed and dated l.r.: Joshua Cristall.1816, numbered l.l.: 18, watercolour over traces of pencil with gum arabic, stopping out and scratching out24.2 x 16.6 cm; 9 9/16 x 6 1/2 inchesProvenanceDavis & Long Company New York, 1980;Private collection, New York until 2019ExhibitedDavid & Long Company, ‘English Watercolours’, November 1-29 1980, no. 11, illus.Cristall’s charming sketches of rustic labourers at work provide an interesting record of rural labour in the early nineteenth century when the land was changing fast as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Much of his work depicted country people; their natural dignity and simplicity were qualities he found appealing. Encouraged by the popularity of his country figure studies he exhibited many such works.He was a founder member of the Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1804 and his work is included in the collections of many major U.K. museums.

Watercolour11.7 x 18.2 cm.; 4 ½ x 7 1/8 inchesProvenanceGeorge Clive, Herefordshire, by descent;Spink;Sir John Gielgud, purchased from the above, his sale at Sotheby’s, London, 5 April 2001, lot 21

Signed and dated l.l.: J Cristall 1829, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and touches of gum arabic37.8 x 28.2 cm.; 14 7/8 x 11 1/8 inchesProvenanceAbbott and Holder Ltd.;Mrs Brian McQuade, Chertsey;By descent until 2023ExhibitedSociety of Painters in Water-Colours, 1829, no. 62 or 219 or 325 (Cristall exhibited 3 works entitled Fern Burners, Coppett Hill, Goodrich, Herefordshire in 1829)This is a particularly fine watercolour depicting the fern gatherers on Coppett Hill, whom Cristall liked to draw. The bracken on the hill was cut, as shown in the present work, and the stubble then burnt, releasing potash to encourage the next year’s growth. The bracken was used for making soap, often in cauldrons on the hillside, as litter in pigsties and for thatching.Coppett Hill rises steeply out of Goodrich village, with woodland turning into stony bracken before a long descent to the river Wye below Coldwell Rocks. The hill has views of the Brecon and Black Mountains in one direction and the Malvern Hills in the other. It was a favourite walk of the artist, who lived from 1823 at Granton Cottage in Goodrich, which had fine views of Coppett Hill.

Pastel13.7 x 22 cm.; 5 3/8 x 8 ¾ inchesPrivate collection, U.K. until 2024

Signed l.l.: Charles D’Oyly, watercolour over pencil18 x 15.5 cmThe interior of the artist’s house at Patna is illustrated in two watercolours dated 1824 in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, nos. 2019 and 2020 which show that D’Oyly’s house was a busy place, full of visitors and dogs.The present work, which relates to the Yale drawings, depicts details of the interior with a colonial sofa, a table, wall lights and a heavy curtain at the French window, as well as a travel book propped against the wall and a framed marine painting. A lush garden with palm trees can be glimpsed in the distance through the open window.D’Oyly and his second wife Elizabeth Jane Ross moved to Patna in Bihar in 1821 when he became Opium Agent for the East India Company. Their house at Bankipore, a suburb of Patna, was a focus of artistic activity, and Elizabeth also painted as well as being a musician.

Oil on paper12.6 x 19 cm; 5 x 7½ inchesProvenance:James Danby, the son of the artist;With Anthony Reed, London, 1978;Christie’s, London, 7 June 2007, lot 97;With WS Fine Art, summer 2009, no. 19;The Flannery collection, UK, and by descent until 2018.Exhibited:Anthony Reed and Davis & Long, London and New York, English Sketches and Studies, 1978, no. 86;WS Fine Art, London, summer exhibition 2009, no. 19.Danby was a very keen sailor and also had a life-long interest in building boats. This dramatic sketch of an untidy boat yard under a heavy, brooding sky, drawn on the spot, may well record work on one of his own boats, The Chase .Danby lived on the Maer near Exmouth from 1846. It has been suggested that this work shows The Point in Exmouth, where the flag flew next to Ferry Cottage to indicate when and where the ferry crossed from Exmouth over to Starcross. 1 There were two boat building firms listed at The Point, on the other side of Ferry Cottage, one owned by John Hayman, where Danby’s boat The Chase was constructed in 1847–1848. This yacht provoked comment due to its innovative and unusually broad hollow keel. 2 Danby later built himself a yacht called the Dragon Fly in which he was shipwrecked off Axmouth in August 1860, the year before he died.Another oil sketch of a boat building shed, of a similar size and reminiscent of the work of Corot, is dated by Francis Greenacre to c. 1840. 3 Stylistically the present work may also be compared with a group of spontaneous sketches of the Exe and Exmouth dating from c. 1855. 4 They appear to be records of landscape and atmospheric effects done on the spot or very shortly afterwards. This group, many of which had inscriptions saying ‘Francis Danby ARA’ on the verso in James Danby’s hand, were bought from a member of the Danby family who lived near St Albans by a local dealer around 1930. 51. April Marjoram, by email communication with the author, October 2018.2. Western Times, 30 June 1849.3. F. Greenacre, ‘Francis Danby 1793–1861’, exhibition catalogue, City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and Tate Gallery, 1988, no. 52, p. 121.4. Ibid., nos. 53–8.5. Eric Adams, Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Landscape, 1973, no. 58; see F. Greenacre, op. cit., p. 123 (under no. 57).

Evelyn De Morgan (1855 – 1919)A study for Boreas and the Fallen Leaves, c. 1910 - 1914Coloured chalks on buff paper36.8 x 23.5 cm.; 14 3/8 x 9 ½ inchesProvenancePrivate collection, U.K. and by family descent until 2024Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind. In this study for Boreas and the Fallen Leaves in the collection of the De Morgan Foundation (P_EDM_0044) he is shown with his lips pursed, blowing the wind. The oil depicts him by a gnarled oak tree, blowing the leaves which turn to maidens with long golden hair as they fall to the ground.The most important of the four wind gods, Boreas is usually depicted as a winged man of mature age, his hair floating in the wind. He had two faces, so he could see where he was going and from where he was coming.https://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection/boreas-and-the-fallen-leaves/The model for Boreas was the professional artist’s model, Alessandro di Marco from Piedmont. Evelyn De Morgan made studies of him on several occasions, initially when she was at the Slade and later in her own studio. This drawing probably dates from 1880s. Another study of Alessandro, for her 1899 painting The Valley of Shadows is on the same buff colour paper, and also probably dates to the 1880s: https://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection/study-of-a-head-male/Di Marco was used by Evelyn De Morgan in another work depicting Boreas, Boreas and Oreithyia (De Morgan Foundation P_EDM_0040, 1896). He also features in Aurora Triumphans (1876), Life and Thought Have Gone Away(1893), The Poor Man Who Saved the City (1901), The Marriage of St. Francis and Holy Poverty (1905), The Gilded Cage, A Soul in Hell (with curly hair) and '1914'.Di Marco modelled for Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) in Rome. Alessandro was one of the artists’ models working in London around 1870. Sir William Blake Richmond (1842-1921) described him as “a fellow so graceful and of such a colour, a kind of bronze gold” (S.T. Buckle, British Art Journal, Autumn 2012, Vol. 13, Issue 2, p.67:https://www.eb-j.org/pdfViewer/articles/MTA1OA==2012). William Hamo Thornycroft noted in his diary that Alessandro sat for long periods of time without a break. He was the model for Merlin in Edward Burne-Jones’s earlier work ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’ (1872-77). He was also photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. George Richmond described him as ‘the living embodiment of a classical sculpture’.The first owner of this drawing was a keen collector of De Morgan’s work, and also owned ‘The Dryad’ (1884-5) now in the De Morgan Foundation.Evelyn De Morgan, who attended the Slade School of Art, was influenced by George F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones and by the work of her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. She often visited Stanhope in Florence, where she developed a love of the work of Botticelli and quattrocento art. She first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. In 1887 she married the ceramicist William De Morgan, with whom she often wintered in Florence.De Morgan’s work is held in many national collections including the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, National Trust properties Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton and Knightshayes Court, Devon, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, the National Portrait Gallery, London and Southwark Art Collection, London.With thanks to Scott Thomas Buckle for his comments on this work.

Pencil17.8 x 17.7 cm; 7 x 7 inchesProvenance: M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, by descent until 2018.Evelyn De Morgan, who attended the Slade School of Art, was influenced by George F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones and by the work of her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. She often visited Stanhope in Florence, where she developed a love of the work of Botticelli and Quattrocento art. She first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. In 1887 she married the ceramicist William De Morgan, with whom she often wintered in Florence.It has been suggested that this may be a preliminary study for a figure in her painting The Red Cross, 1916, in the collection of the De Morgan Foundation.Her work is held in many national collections including the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; the National Trust properties Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton, and Knightshayes Court, Devon; the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Southwark Art Collection, London.Maxwell David Eugene Clayton-Stamm was an authority on the work of William De Morgan (on whom he published extensively), Pre-Raphaelite ceramics and the Blake-Varley sketchbook of 1819. He was a collector and bibliophile.

Oil on paper laid down on canvas32 x 49 cm.; 12 ½ x 19 ½ inchesProvenanceMiss H.H. Tatlock, the artist’s granddaughter;C.K. Bloom;Percy Moore Turner (1877 – 1950);Sotheby’s, London, 2 May 1962, lot 133, where purchased by Agnew’s, London;Simon C. Dickinson, London, where purchased by the previous ownerExhibitedUsher Art Gallery, Lincoln, Peter de Wint, 1937, no. 77;Agnew’s, London, Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Wint, 1966, no. 66This atmospheric oil on paper is most probably St Michael’s, Bray, on the Thames. De Wint made several watercolours of the church.

Inscribed verso: View in Cumberland F de Wint, watercolour, on two sheets, joined15.2 x 64.7 cm; 6 x 25½ inchesProvenance: Lady Lyons, her sale at Christie’s, London, 24 October 1960, lot 42;With Spink & Son Ltd, London, K3 1910;H. A. Molins, his sale at Sotheby’s, London, 22 November 2007, lot 143;With WS Fine Art, London, 2008;The Flannery collection, UK, and by descent until 2018.Exhibited: WS Fine Art, summer 2008, no. 34.This atmospheric panorama with a remarkably extensive uninterrupted vista dates from the 1830s and is a companion to A View of the Cumberland Hills from Patterdale , in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (D1924.63). Both watercolours are painted with wet, broad washes in the same palette on two sketchbook pages joined together, in the narrow panoramic format favoured by the artist, and are identical in size. They were presumably done on the spot. It seems highly probable that this watercolour is also of the fell region between Keswick and Penrith. De Wint is thought to have drawn these when visiting from the homes of his patrons the Howards of Leben or the Lonsdales of Lowther, with both of whom he stayed.The Gentleman’s Magazine obituary of the artist stated, His visits to the lakes of Westmerland [sic] and Cumberland produced many valuable sketches and drawings of picturesque scenery of a higher character; and his characteristic diligence in studying nature under all circumstances was never relaxed. 11. September 1849, p. 322, quoted in John Lord, ed., ‘Peter de Wint 1784–1849’, exhibition catalogue, Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln, 2007, p. 145.

Watercolour over faint traces of pencil with scratching out26.6 x 54.4 cm sight sizeProvenanceWith Thomas Agnew & Sons. Ltd, London, no. 14733, cat. no 45;Sir Robert and Lady Mayer, by descent to the present ownerExhibitedAgnew’s Galleries, London, 1966, Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Wint, in aid of Lincoln Cathedral Fabric Maintenance Fund, no. 74Peter De Wint was the son of a physician who, though born in New York of Dutch immigrant parents, was trained in Holland and London. The artist’s marriage to Harriet Hilton, sister of fellow painter William Hilton, introduced him to their native Lincolnshire where they spent many of their summers and which was to provide him with a lifetime of inspiration. In Harriet de Wint’s Memoir she wrote, ‘at Lincoln and the neighbourhood where he ever found new beauties and new subjects...the long, extensive distances with their ever varying effects. .afforded him unceasing delight’ (H. De Wint, A Short Memoir of the Life of Peter De Wint and William Hilton, R.A.’, privately printed, pp. 84).This lovely De Wint is a masterly example of his skilled use of the wet brush, creating layers of colour to build up the Lincolnshire landscape. It has not been possible to identify Yardley Mill; it may be that the mill was named after its owner.This drawing has been in the same family since it was bought by the present owner’s grandmother from Agnew’s in the 1940s.

Signed and dated l.r.: A. Delacroix./1835, watercolour with touches of bodycolour and scratching out, numbered verso: No 1615.6 x 23.9 cmProvenance: Baron François Adolphe Akermann, régent of the Banque de France and his wife Louise Marie née Boquet de Saint-Simon, the Chateau de Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe, France, by direct descent until 2018This drawing comes from a friendship album started by Baron Akermann (1809-1890) for his wife after their marriage in 1836. There was a vogue for such albums in the nineteenth century and visitors would bring a drawing or watercolour as a symbol of friendship or to commemorate a visit. The magnificent leather-bound album contained an unmounted group of drawings and watercolours by artists such as Richard Parkes Bonington, Francia, William Wyld, Decamps, Vernet, Granville, Garneray, Coignet and others. The subjects ranged from marines to genre scenes, landscapes, still lifes, interiors.The B on the boat is the identifying code for Boulogne.Baron François Adolphe Ackerman (1809-1890) was born in Paris and followed his grandfather and father into the world of finance becoming receveur général des Finances for the department of the Dordogne in 1834 at the age of twenty-five. He was an able financier and rebuilt the family estate at Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe also becoming mayor of Rahay. He became deputy governor of the Banque de France in December 1870 and régent of the Banque de France on 27 January 1871, holding the office until his death. He was painted by Winterhalter. He and his wife had two daughters one of whom, Henrietta, married vicomte Henri de Bouillé.

Signed with initials, inscribed and dated verso: G.D. 1836/Puerta Romana/Cordoba, watercolour over pencil22 x 32 cmProvenanceBernard Williams Weller (1870-1944), journalist and criticGeorge Dennis was an English artist, explorer and writer. He left school at 15 but was a prodigious linguist, who taught himself ancient Greek and Latin then learnt Spanish, French, Portuguese and several other languages. His intrepid spirit inspired his first visit to Spain in the 1830s. From Cadiz he travelled to Grenada through the Sierra Nevada, visiting Cacin, Alhama, the Tajo, the Sierra Tejada, Velez, Malaga and Ronda. He continued on to Gibraltar via Benadalid, Gaucin, Posada amongst other places and then finally returned to Cadiz. The roads were dangerous and he encountered difficulties with banditti. He also ventured further north visiting Tudela, Zaragoza, Toledo and Illesas. His first work, ‘A Summer in Andalucia’ (2 volumes) was published in 1839.Dennis travelled further in Italy and made an illustrated study of the cemeteries of Etruria, which was published in 1848 by the British Museum, London and he completed the first account of Etruscan sources in the modern era.He joined the Colonial Service later in life and became vice-consul to Sicily, and subsequently to Benghazi and Smyrna. He was a companion of the Order of St Michael and St George.

Signed l.l.: DETMOLD, watercolour over pencil with a brown line border31.3 x 20.3 cmProvenanceAlan Fortunoff, by descent until 2017Detmold worked as a painter, illustrator and printmaker specialising in meticulous, intense images. He and his twin brother Charles were taken by their great-uncle to London zoo and the Natural History Museum to draw from an early age. Their uncle Henry Detmold, an artist, further encouraged their development and they absorbed the influence of Japanese printmakers, fashionable in the late 19th century.E.J. Detmold’s work is to be found in many museum collections including that of the British Museum, the V&A and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.Alan Fortunoff (1933-2000) was an American department store magnate who transformed the Fortunoff Department Store. He formed a fine collection British nineteenth and twentieth century art.

Inscribed above: Furness Fells with a fall that runs into Coniston Water and Blawith Bridge, pen and grey ink and watercolour over pencil, with a grey line border, on laid paper watermarked JWHATMAN38 x 54 cm; 15 x 21 1/4 inchesProvenance: Sotheby’s 15 July 1976, lot 151;Where bought by the previous owner, the Pemberton collection until 2019The younger brother of Arthur Devis the portrait painter, Anthony Devis exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1761-1781. He travelled extensively in the British Isles and made several trips to the Lakes. By the end of the 1750s he had begun producing Lake District views, including the large oil painting now in Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, a ‘View of Derwentwater and Skiddaw from Lord’s Island’. Nothing is known of his visits to the Lake District but he produced a number of drawings in his characteristic style. The Wordsworth Trust own a drawing of Furness Abbey by Devis amongst a group of several others.

Watercolour with touches of bodycolour6.5 x 8 cmLady Emily Dundas, née Reynolds-Moreton, was the fourth daughter of Thomas, 1st Earl of Ducie and sister of Augusta Raymond-Barker’s stepmother Lady Catherine Reynolds-Moreton, who married John Raymond-Barker in 1841 as his second wife. In 1847 she married Admiral Sir James Whitley Deans Dundas, G CB (1785–1862) as his second wife. He became the First Naval Lord in the first Russell ministry in July 1847 and they lived at Admiralty House. Thackeray records that during the 1850 season Lady Emily Dundas gave a party at which anyone who was anyone would wish to be seen (Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century – ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’, 2007).Provenance: Augusta Raymond-Barker, Fairford Park, Gloucestershire; thence by family descent until 2016

i A figure with a pitcher near a cottage with two donkeysOil on varnished laid paper30 x 39 cm; 113⁄4 x 153⁄8 inchesii A woodland cottage with cows near a pondOil on varnished laid paper with traces of pencil30.5 x 44.6 cm; 12 x 171⁄2 inchesiii A wooded landscape with a herdsman and cows near a cottageOil on varnished laid paper25 x 34 cm; 93⁄4 x 133⁄8 inchesiv A landscape with a herdsman and cowsOil on varnished laid paper with traces of pencil29.5 x 37 cm; 115⁄8 x 141⁄2 inchesSold (iv)Provenance:John Mayheux (d. 1839); General Arthur Easton (1863–1949); By whom bequeathed to his godson Major C. G. Carew Hunt (d. 1980);With Michael Harvard by 1959; With Edward Speelman; Brian Jenks, his sale, Sotheby’s, London, 27 June 1973, lot 46; Where acquired by the father of the previous owner, by descent until 2018.Exhibited : Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, Festival of Britain 'Gainsborough Exhibition', 1951.Literature: John Hayes, 'The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough', 1982, vol. 1, pp. 196 and 231, no. 24, illus. plate 262 (landscape with herdsman and cows).These virtuoso oil sketches are from a larger group of about thirteen done by Gainsborough Dupont, Thomas Gainsborough’s nephew, pupil and studio assistant, and were thought to be by Gainsborough until John Hayes positively identified the hand of Dupont. Five of this group are in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, two are in the Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, and two are at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury. Eight were sold at Sotheby’s, London, in June 1973, including the present examples.Hayes describes these oil sketches on paper as amongst Gainsborough Dupont’s finest works, splendidly fluent, richly painted, these decorative compositions, with their surface emphasis and animation, are a fine late expression of the rococo (Hayes, op. cit., p. 231). He notes that they are Dupont’s most personal and distinctive contribution to the genre, and of historical interest as oil sketches clearly intended as finished compositions for display. The group exemplifies what Hayes described as Dupont’s latter-day rococo emphasis on decorative picturemaking: on surface pattern, rhythmic forms and line, and brilliant, often darting or flickering effects of light (ibid., p. 191). The two unfinished landscapes illustrate how the artist painted confidently directly on to paper with oils, sometimes with pencil underdrawing.The first reference to Gainsborough Dupont’s landscapes appears to have been in 1792 when the journalist Bate-Dudley, who was well informed about the workings of Gainsborough’s studio, records that some beautiful little studies of rural nature have also lately employed this Artist’s pencil ('Morning Herald', 9 March 1792; see Hayes, op. cit., pp. 188–9 and 235). Philip Thicknesse, one of Gainsborough’s oldest friends, notes 'at the end of his brief life of Gainsborough that Dupont was a man of exquisite genius, little inferior in the line of a painter to his uncle ... either as a landscape or Portrait painter' (ibid., pp. 187 and 302). Mrs Bell noted that his original works were chiefly landscapes ('Thomas Gainsborough', London, 1897, p. 66).Gainsborough Dupont was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 24 December 1754, the third son of Philip Dupont and Thomas Gainsborough’s sister Sarah. In the 1760s Dupont was sent to Bath to be raised by his aunt Mary Gibbon, the recently widowed sister of Thomas and Sarah, who set up a millinery shop there beside her brother’s studio in 1762. On 12 January 1772, Dupont was formally apprenticed to Gainsborough, the older man’s first and only studio assistant, and worked for him for sixteen years. Dupont was painted by his uncle four times in the early 1770s (see David Solkin et al., 'Gainsborough’s Family Album', National Portrait Gallery, London, 2018, nos 26, 32& 48 and fig. 36). On 6 March 1775, some nine months after the Gainsboroughs moved to London, Dupont joined the Royal Academy Schools. After his formal training he worked in his uncle’s studio in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, and continued to live at his home there, where he learned to scrape mezzotints and made small copies in oil after his uncle’s portraits. In 1784, Gainsborough asked him to copy a portrait of Queen Caroline to accompany a portrait of her husband George II by John Shackleton in Huntingdon Town Hall. After Gainsborough’s death on 2 August 1788, his nephew had the opportunity to develop his own practice.Dupont continued to work in the studio at Schomberg House. Portrait commissions came, notably from George III, who admired his work, and from some of the children of his uncle’s friends. In 1793 he was given his most prestigious commission, to paint a huge canvas, larger than any his uncle had painted, of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House: thirty-one figures placed across a canvas nine and a half feet tall and nearly nineteen feet wide. The group portrait – commissioned to decorate the newly completed headquarters of Trinity House on Tower Hill – took three years to complete. In 1794 Thomas Harris (d. 1820), a theatrical proprietor, commissioned a series of spirited portraits of actors that are, with a few exceptions, now in the Garrick Club, London. Dupont was also a painter of landscapes (see catalogue by John Hayes, op. cit., pp. 192–6) and he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1790 to 1795.Hayes notes that the dating of Dupont’s landscapes is problematic, but that there does appear to be a progression from a grand, slightly stiff manner, through a poetic, pastoral kind of landscape, linking with Gainsborough’s smaller late works, to a more fluent, vigorous and dramatic style, possibly influenced by Lawrence. This group fits into his later oeuvre.John Mayheux, the first owner of these pictures, was an assistant at the Board of Control, under Lord Melville, which oversaw the activities of the East India Company from London.

Pencil and washes, in its original early 19th century frame with acanthus leaves at the corners33 x 22.1 cm; 13 x 8 ¾ inchesProvenance: Miss Elizabeth Broadwood, Canterbury, by descent; Colt Clavier Collection, Bethersden, Kent, until 2018.Literature: David Wainwright, 'Broadwood by Appointment: A History', 1985, ill. facing p. 185.This portrait of Thomas Broadwood shows him as a young man of leisure. He was the second surviving son of John Broadwood, and the third generation of the piano manufacturers John Broadwood & Sons, who made upright and grand pianos, where he worked as business manager of the company. He met Beethoven as a young man in 1818 and sent him a newly improved triple stringed piano (which subsequently belonged to Liszt and is now in the National Museum in Budapest). Thomas Broadwood purchased the Holmbush estate in Lower Beeding, Sussex, in 1824–1825, and employed Francis Edwards to design a two-storey castellated mansion with octagonal turrets. He grew dahlias in the gardens, which were highly fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s. Broadwood was High Sheriff of Sussex in 1833. Edridge’s work can be found in the collections of Britain’s major museums.

This group of work explores the artist’s physical connection to the material world. Made in all weathers by the riverbank, and executed without correction in one sitting on one day, each image refers both to the immediacy of this encounter and the recollection of past experience. This singular occurrence becomes one of a sequence, forming over time a living record that reflects on the fluid interaction of water and ground while simultaneously employing the elements – rain, silt, river water - as both the medium and material in their making.Mixed media on paper57 x 76 cmJune 2017

Signed l.l.: Emily Farmer, watercolour over traces of pencil with gum arabic and scratching out43 x 32 cm.; 15 17/18 x 12 5/8 inchesProvenanceSir Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of Selborne, Blackmoor House, HampshireExhibitedNew Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1860, no. 344; Winchester Art Loan Exhibition, 1875 (lent by Lord Selborne); Hiscock Gallery, Southsea, HampshireThis watercolour is the artist’s most famous work, executed in 1860, which was reproduced in different media. When it was exhibited in 1875 it was given special mention in The Hampshire Advertiser, June 23, 1874, p. 4, issue 3028: WINCHESTER ART LOAN EXHIBITION‘Lord Selborne-lent by his lordship- who has also a delightful picture “Deceiving Granny”, in which Emily Farmer, the artist has caught a scene thoroughly natural, and by no means rare, where a lovely girl and boy are being measured back to back by a loving grandmother, and the latter young rascal is rejoicing in gaining a half-inch over his merry sister by a surreptitious “tip toe”.’Emily Farmer exhibited over one hundred works at the New Society of Painters in Water Colours during her lifetime, achieving good notices from contemporary critics, but her work has fallen from public view like that of many other women artists.She was the daughter of John Biker Farmer who worked for the East India Company and his wife Frances Ann (née Frost). Like many women of her generation Emily was home educated and was taught art by her brother Alexander Farmer, the genre painter.Farmer’s early work was in miniature and she exhibited twice at the Royal Academy in 1847 and 1849 but from 1850 she began to concentrate on genre painting and developed her particular love of painting children.Farmer was elected to the New Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1854.Of a membership of fifty-seven artists in 1850 she was the tenth female member of the Society added four years later, the other nine being Fanny and Louisa Corbaux, Jane Egerton, Fanny Harris, Mary Margetts, Mrs William (Emma) Oliver, Sarah Setchell and Fanny Steers. She exhibited nearly one hundred works there, including the present watercolour, over the course of her artistic career.Pamela Nunn points out that although there was not much women’s work exhibited at the New Society’s exhibitions it was often regarded as the most interesting.1 Farmer was singled out for special mention by contemporary critics:“...Miss Farmer’s pictures, which are, all things considered, the best figure pieces in the collection. They are true in gesture and expression, conscientious in execution and harmonious in colour”, Spectator, May 3, 1862, p. 495.“Miss Farmer is the only figure artist (here) whose drawings give any hope or promise”..., ibid, April 28, 1866, p. 467.“Let us call attention to the two modest bits of Domestic by Miss Farmer, the best of that class in the room”, Critic, April 28, 1860, p. 351.Farmer also exhibited work at the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours and the Liverpool Academy.Emily Farmer lived for over half a century at Porchester House in Porchester, Hampshire where she died in 1905. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Porchester.Examples of her work can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of Selborne (1812-1895), PC, FRCS, was an English lawyer and politician. He was appointed Solicitor General in Lord Palmerston’s government in 1861 and promoted to Attorney General in 1862.He handled many questions of international law which arose from the American Civil War including the Alabama Affair and was the leading counsel for Britain before the Alabama Claims tribunal in Geneva. In 1872 he was appointed Lord Chancellor under Gladstone, an office he held again from 1880-1885. He lived at Blackmoor House in Hampshire, built from 1865-1882 to the designs of Alfred Waterhouse. Two chairs and a hanging corner cupboard designed by Waterhouse for Blackmoor are now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour and scratching out24.5 x 35.5 cmProvenanceSotheby’s, 13 July, 1989, lot 173, bought by Neuberg;Private collection, U.K.Legend has it that a giant called Gwendol Wrekin ap Shenkin ap Mynyddmawr had a grudge against the town of Shrewsbury and decided to flood it to kill all its inhabitants. He collected a giant-sized spade of earth and set off towards the town. When he was near Wellington he met a cobbler returning from Shrewsbury market with a large sack of shoes for repair. The giant asked him for directions, adding that he was going to dump his spade of earth in the River Severn and flood the town. "It's a very long way to Shrewsbury," replied the quick-thinking shoemaker. "Look at all these shoes I've worn out walking back from there!" The giant changed his mind and dumped the earth on the ground beside him, creating the Wrekin.

Watercolour over pencil with scratching out13.9 x 20 cmThe artist was the youngest son of Nathan Theodore Fielding. From c. 1827 to 1830 he lived in Paris, where he ran the family engraving business, at which William Callow worked. He collaborated with his brothers Thales and Theodore in England before returning to France, where he built up an extensive teaching practice, with pupils including members of the family of King Louis-Philippe.Provenance: Augusta Raymond-Barker, Fairford Park, Gloucestershire; thence by family descent until 2016

Inscribed l.l. on original mount: At Tenby, pen and brown ink, brush and brown and grey wash on laid paper, partially watermarked FABRIANO21 x 26.3 cm.; 8 ¼ x 10 ¼ inchesHeneage Finch, 4th Earl of Aylesford was a talented amateur artist who studied drawing with John Baptist Malchair while he was at Christ Church College, Oxford. His mature style shows show the influence of Rembrandt, whose etchings he collected.Aylesford made frequent tours to Wales, including a trip in 1803 when he may have made this view of Tenby. Another very similar but slightly smaller drawing of boats at the shore at Tenby by him is in the collection of Tate (T08126) and a further view of Tenby is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2009.70.30).He was also a politician, patron of the arts (he was a trustee of the British Museum from 1787-1812), etcher and a talented amateur architect. His work can be found in many institutional collections.

Signed c.r.: Francia, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and touches of bodycolour, numbered verso: No 44.20.4 x 29.4 cmProvenanceBaron François Adolphe Akermann, régent of the Banque de France and his wife Louise Marie née Boquet de Saint-Simon, the Chateau de Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe, France, by direct descent until 2018An important addition to Francia’s known oeuvre, this drawing shows the busy port of Dunkirk with loggers moving their wood in the foreground in front of a variety of moored boats. The Leughenaer, or Liar’s Tower, on the right of the composition, is one of the most famous monuments in Dunkirk and continues to dominate the old port. It was erected by Jacques Desfontaines in 1405 and is Dunkirk’s oldest surviving building. Originally part of the port’s fortifications, it became Dunkirk’s first lighthouse at the end of the eighteenth century. The Leughenaer is 30 metres high and overlooks Minck Square, the site of the old fish market. Between 1814 and 1823 the top section with a search light was added to the tower.There is a drawing by Francia dating from around 1824, now in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dunkirk, which shows the tower from the quay on the right had side of the present watercolour (see Louis Francia’ Musée des Beaux-Arts, Calais 1988/89, no. 79).Francia was Bonington’s teacher whose work provides an important link between British and French watercolour painting in the early nineteenth century. A native of Calais, he left for London in 1788 after the outbreak of the French Revolution and remained until 1817. He established a practise as a drawing master in London and a reputation as a painter of marine and landscape watercolours. He attended the Monro ‘academy’, made sketching tours, was secretary of the Brothers, a sketching club of which Girtin was a member and was also secretary of the Associated Artists in Water Colours. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1795-1822. He returned to Calais in 1817. He gave Bonington his first professional lessons in watercolour in Calais as well as other artists including William Wyld, Eugène Isabey, Tesson and Collignon. British and French artists who passed through the town on a tour of the coast or en route to Paris or London would visit him.Baron François Adolphe Ackerman (1809-1890) was born in Paris and followed his grandfather and father into the world of finance becoming receveur général des Finances for the department of the Dordogne in 1834 at the age of twenty-five. He was an able financier and rebuilt the family estate at Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe also becoming mayor of Rahay. He became deputy governor of the Banque de France in December 1870 and régent of the Banque de France on 27 January 1871, holding the office until his death. He was painted by Winterhalter. He and his wife had two daughters one of whom, Henrietta, married Vicomte Henri de Bouillé.

Signed on sail: Francia, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and touches of bodycolour, numbered on old mount: No 8114 x 20.4 cmProvenanceBaron François Adolphe Akermann, régent of the Banque de France and his wife Louise Marie née Boquet de Saint-Simon, the Chateau de Coulonges, Rahay, Sarthe, France, by direct descent until 2018This drawing comes from a friendship album started by Baron Akermann (1809-1890) for his wife after their marriage in 1836. There was a vogue for such albums in the nineteenth century and visitors would bring a drawing or watercolour as a symbol of friendship or to commemorate a visit. The magnificent leatherbound album contained an unmounted group of drawings and watercolours by artists such as Richard Parkes Bonington, Francia, William Wyld, Decamps, Vernet, Granville, Garneray, Coignet and others. The subjects ranged from marines to genre scenes, landscapes, still lifes, interiors.

Signed l.c.: FRANCIA, watercolour over traces of pencil.10 x 23 cm.; 4 x 9 inchesProvenanceSir William Forbes, 7th Baronet, of Pitsligo (1773-1828), also of Colinton House, Greenhill House and Fettercairn House, Kincardineshire and by descent until 2017;With Abbott and Holder;Private collection U.K. until 2024Francia was Bonington’s teacher whose work provides an important link between British and French watercolour painting in the early nineteenth century. A native of Calais, he left for London after the outbreak of the French Revolution and remained until 1817. He established a practise as a drawing master in London and a reputation as a painter of marine and landscape watercolours. He attended the Monro ‘academy’, made sketching tours, was secretary of the Brothers, a sketching club of which Girtin was a member and was also secretary of the Associated Artists in Water Colours. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1795-1822. He returned to Calais in 1817.Sir William Forbes, 7th Bt., began acquiring Old Master drawings as a young man, travelled to Italy in 1827 and formed an important collection of Old Master paintings later in life. He bought extensively from the posthumous sales of John McGouan (L. 1496), another significant Scottish collector, in 1803 and 1804. He was also an enthusiastic patron of British contemporary watercolourists.

Black chalk with stump over pencil on laid paper27.8 x 38.9 cm; 11 x 15¼ inchesProvenance: Arthur Kay (1861–1939), Edinburgh; Edith Oliver (1894–1972); By descent until sold at Christie’s, London, 11 November 1997, lot 7; David Stokes, London; Private collection, UK, until 2018.Literature: Hugh Belsey, 'A Second Supplement to John Hayes’s ‘The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough’, no. 1086, Master Drawings, Vol. 46, No. 4, ‘Drawings by Gainsborough’ (Winter, 2008), pp. 427–541.This drawing probably dates from the mid 1780s. The comparatively free handling of the forms is similar to a group of other drawings of this date (see Belsey, op. cit., nos. 1074 and 1077–92). Arthur Kay, the first recorded owner of this work, owned a group of drawings by Gainsborough, some of which were sold at Christie’s on 23 May 1930, although it has not been possible to precisely identify the present drawing as one of these.

KT453AGeorge Garrard, ARA (1760-1826)Hyde Park from the artist’s painting room window at Knightsbridge, 1793Inscribed verso: Hidepark from Knightsbridge/D Room 1793, inscribed on a label: Hyde Park from the Artists painting room window at Knightsbridge 1793., oil on laid paper16.2 x 20 cm.; 6 3/8 x 7 7/8 inchesProvenanceMr Nicholson, Oxford, until 1942, when acquired byEdward Croft-Murray, CBE, (1907-1980);Jill Croft-Murray until 2020;Woolley and Wallis, The Edward Croft-Murray Collection, 11 August 2021, lot 421ExhibitedArts Council of Great Britain, ‘Paintings from Nature; The Tradition of Open air Oil Sketching’, 1980, cat. no. 40This delightful oil sketch originally came from an album of oil sketches from nature, assembled by the artist for his own pleasure, inscribed ‘Studies from nature by G. Garrard’. Garrard’s painting room was in the hamlet of Knightsbridge, overlooking Hyde Park. Its spontaneity and the looseness of the brush strokes is suggestive of a plein air sketch, although we know that it was painted through the window of Garrard’s drawing room which was evidently very close to the park.This sketch would have been produced as an aide memoire for the artist and is typical of the type of work which was produced in the late 18th century neither for exhibition nor sale but as a means of understanding nature. The rediscovery of the genre has been explored in the exhibition ‘Truth to Nature Open air Painting In Europe 1780-1870’, 2020.Five further examples of his oil sketches in and around London are in the collection of Tate Gallery and another of Woburn Park in the Higgins Museum, Bedford, donated by Edward Croft-Murray, the previous owner of the present work.Garrard came from a family of artists who were descended from Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (c.1561-1636). He was a pupil of Sawrey Gilpin (1733-1807) whose daughter Matilda he married. He studied at the R.A. Schools from 1778 and was a frequent exhibitor there from 1783-1826, becoming an ARA in 1800. Garrard specialised in animal portraiture and sculpture, but also painted landscapes, portraits and urban views. From 1795 he worked increasingly as a sculptor.He died in Brompton, then a village next to Knightsbridge. where many artists lived.

Watercolour over traces of pencil with touches of white, gum arabic and scratching out36.5 x 47.3 cmProvenanceThe Oppé collection, Sotheby’s, 15 July 2016, lot 135 (as British School)Gastineau made many watercolours of Welsh subjects, some of which were engraved and published as Wales Illustrated in 1830–31. These included another version of this view, showing the Eagle Tower from a slightly different angle: see below. He exhibited two watercolours of Caernarvon Castle at the Old WaterColour Society (OWS), in 1830, no. 356 (possibly the present drawing), and again in 1847, no. 225.The artist was known for his successful moonlit watercolours, to which according to Roget he gave a characteristic mellowness by means of preliminary washes of warm colour: see J. L. Roget, A History of the Old WaterColour Society, 1891, reprinted 1972, p. 508.

KT341Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: On the Holmwood/Dorking/H. Gastineau/1864(?), watercolour over pencil with touches of gum arabic27 x 37.5 cm.; 10 5/8 x 14 ¾ inchesA prolific and successful watercolourist, Gastineau travelled widely in the British Isles and abroad. He was based in Camberwell, London from 1827. Gastineau exhibited numerous views of Surrey throughout his long career. His work may be found in many UK museum collections.

Signed and dated l.l.: M. Gianni.1897, further inscribed on previous backboard: Grand Harbour/EA (?), gouache19 x 53 cmProvenance: Private collection, UK, until 2019This bright watercolour is a fine example of the delicate work of M. Gianni, known as Maria to collectors, whose work is included in numerous collections in Malta. The shipping is particularly nicely drawn in great detail.

Signed l.l.: GLUCK, oil on canvas, in original Gluck frame27.8 x 23 cm.; 10 7/8 x 9 inchesFrame size 54 x 48.5 cm.; 21 ¼ x 19 ¼ inchesProvenanceFine Art Society, Diverse Paintings by Gluck, November 1932, no. 20;With Anthony Mould in 1982;Private collection, U.K.ExhibitedFine Art Society, Diverse Paintings by Gluck, November 1932, no. 20;Gluck Art and Identity, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, UK, 18 November 2017 to 11 March 2018LiteratureDiana Souhani, Gluck Her Biography, London 1988, p.73;Gluck Art and Identity, ed. Amy de la Haye and Martin Pel, (exhibition catalogue), Yale University Press, 2017, p. 107, ill.Full catalogue available.

Duncan Grant (1885-1978)The Blue TableclothSigned and dated l.l.: D. Grant/32, oil on canvas boardProvenanceThomas Agnew & Sons, London (7524); sold toIsobel Jeans, 20 July 1932;Wyndham T. Vint, Bradford;Christie’s London, 16 July 2014, lot 102 where bought by the present ownerGrant’s painting style was influenced by the French Post-Impressionist exhibitions organized in London by Roger Fry in 1910. He painted still lifes throughout his life, constantly juxtaposing different objects, fruit and plants on a tabletop. Here the skillfully painted blue tablecloth provides a backdrop to the carefully arranged bowl of fruit with black grapes, bananas and apples juxtaposed with a bottle, seen in many of his still lifes. A couple of red roses balance the composition. This still life was most probably painted at Charleston, Grant’s home in Sussex which he shared with Vanessa Bell. He moved there with his lover David Garnett and Bell’s two children Julian and Quentin. Their father Clive Bell was a frequent visitor, although he kept his permanent home in London. Agnew’s sold many paintings for Duncan Grant over the course of his lifetime.

Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: E F Green Poonah 1847, oil on canvas76.9 x 63.8 cm; 30 ¼ x 25 1/8 inchesProvenanceChristie’s, London, 5 June 1996, lot 140;Private collection, ScandinaviaExhibitedRoyal Academy, 1851, no. 446In this evocative image, the snake charmer holds a pungi. His assistant has a python draped around him and a mongoose, commonly included in snake charmers’ performances, is tied up in the corner of the composition. A third snake slithers in the foreground. They are standing in a landscape with a fort on a hill in the middle distance, with mountains beyond. Green, while not known for his topographical accuracy, seems to have captured the hilly landscape around Poona, and the building on the rocky outcrop in the present work may be loosely based on the Maratha Hill Fort at Purandhar. The temples may be inspired by the Temples of Parvati at Poona.Snake charmingSnake charming, as it exists today, is thought to have originated in India, and Hinduism has long revered serpents, particularly cobras, as sacred creatures. Originally snake charmers may have been healers, who were able to treat snake bites. Some learned how to handle snakes and could be called upon to remove snakes from places where they were not wanted. They were a familiar sight of Indian street life until the 1970s when the practise was outlawed. The ubiquitous controlled battle between a mongoose, immune to snake venom, and a cobra usually saw the snake charmer handle the lithe mongoose on a rope so that it didn’t kill the cobra.The pungi or tiktiri is an Indian wind instrument consisting of two reed pipes glued together and inserted into the thick end of a gourd – the hollow, dried shell of a fruit in the Cucurbitaceae family of plants, which includes melons, cucumbers and squashes. The mouthpiece is at the narrower end of the gourd. One of the pipes is a drone playing a single note, while the other plays the melody, with fingerholes that can be adjusted with wax to vary the pitch. They are often brightly painted. It is the traditional instrument used by snake charmers to control the snake by movement, as while snakes can sense sound, they cannot hear music.Edward F. GreenThe artist was the fifth son of John Green, a merchant in the Levant and his wife, Harriet. The Green family were prominent members of The Levant Company and the Maltese Consular Service. Edward Green’s dates have been incorrectly recorded, but family records indicate he was born on 11 January 1801, baptised on 14 July 1801 at St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, London, and died in 1884.Green studied at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London, where his name appears in the records as Frederick Edward Green / E.F. Green. He was admitted as a probationary student on 11 January 1822, and registered as a full student on 4 April 1822, aged 21, for painting. Green was admitted to the life drawing school on 29 November 1822. He excelled at the Schools and won a silver medal in 1826, for a copy made in the painting school.The artist married Catherine Colona Stilon in Malta on 2 June 1840 and a daughter, Melita (Kate) was born to the couple on 30 April 1841. They had a second daughter Ellen Green. His brother, James Moring Green (the seventh son), was also an artist and Vice Consul of Naples. Two of his other brothers were Consul and Vice-Consul in Greece and this no doubt lies behind the number of interesting paintings he made of Greek subjects.After his wife’s death in 1845, Edward F. Green sold all his paintings, copies of Old Masters and curiosities at an auction by Foster Auctioneers, 54 Pall Mall (which was advertised in ‘The Atheneum’) and travelled to India. He is recorded as having lived in Bombay, now Mumbai, and evidently travelled in the surrounding area, and possibly, further afield. He stayed in India for three years, returning to Malta in 1848 for the funeral of his father-in-law, Dr Guiseppe Stilon, a Royal Naval Surgeon of Italian origin (whose will is in the National Archives, Kew).Green’s motivation to visit India is not known but it seems likely that it was influenced by the loss of his wife. Little is known about Green’s soujourn there, but he was an artist with a taste for travel and a journey to India would have appeared exciting and begun a new chapter in his life. British artists had been visiting India since William Hodges’ arrival in 1780 and the activities of the East India Company and the increased number of permanent British residents created a market for pictures both in India and the United Kingdom. With his eye for local customs and costumes, Green would have found a ready supply of colourful subjects to paint.Exhibition HistoryGreen exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, showing 14 works between 1824 – 1851. He also showed 21 works at the British Institution and exhibited at the Society of British Artists. The artist specialised in exotic and orientalist subjects inspired by his extensive travels in Italy, Greece, Albania, Persia and India, and he specialised in painting particularly evocative oils by highlighting details of local costume and customs. His portrait of a Greek girl in a landscape wearing a Greek costume and embroideries was illustrated as a colour plate in Fani Maria Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece, 1981, col. Pl. V, p. 194. He also worked as a portrait painter, a ready source of income, and in 1830 painted the portrait of Major-General Sir Robert Henry Dick (1785? – 1846), the soldier who lived in India. This was engraved as a mezzotint by Henry Haig circa 1847. A portrait of a young man by Green is in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery.His various addresses are recorded as 13 New Bond Street in 1824; at 65 Upper Charlotte Street in 1826; at 16 Howland Street in 1828 and 1829; at Upper Gloucester Place in 1837; all in London, at Strada Mercante in Valletta, Malta in 1840 and 1841; at 2 Titchfield Terrace in St. John's Wood in 1843; in Bombay, India in 1846 and at 17 Nottingham Street, London in 1851.Poona (Pune), MaharashtraPoona (now Pune) in Maharashtra was one of the major military bases of the British East India Company from 1818 after the fall of Peshwa during the third Anglo-Maratha War. A large military cantonment was built to the east of the city. Due to its milder climate, it was the monsoon capital for Bombay, situated almost two thousand feet up in the Western Ghats. It was one of the most important cities of the Bombay Presidency established in 1858 when India came under direct British rule.Poona had long been a place which British artists visited, from Thomas and William Daniell and James Wales in 1780s and 1790s. Wales founded an art school for local painters in the city in 1791 with the help of Sir Charles Ware Malet, British Resident at the Peshwa’s court, although the school ceased to exist after his death in 1795. William Carpenter (1818 – 1899) was in Poona around the same time as Edward Green and drew many watercolours of the city, its inhabitants and the surrounding area. William Simpson (1823 – 1899) also visited Poona towards the end of his time in India, once the railway had been extended there in 1858.

Inscribed verso: Malacca/where dear William died & was buried/Feby. 4th 1845, watercolour over traces of pencil, further inscribed again on original label, signed on the flyleaf of the album from which it comes13.8 x 23 cm.; 5⅜ x 9 inchesApollonia Griffith was a talented print maker and watercolourist. Her father was the London merchant Thomas Griffith of Ham Common, who had four children including her brother William, celebrated for his contribution to Indian botany.William studied medicine at London University, where his botanical interests developed. In 1832 he joined the East India Company as an assistant surgeon at Madras. After trips to Bhutan and Afghanistan, he took charge of Calcutta Botanic Garden in 1842. Only three years later he was to die at Malacca of hepatitis, leaving behind a widow, young child and three maiden sisters. A cenotaph was erected to commemorate him in the Botanic Garden in Calcutta.On his deathbed William asked fellow botanist John McClelland to sort through and publish his manuscript papers, and it is through these posthumous memoirs, journals of his travels on the Indian subcontinent published in 1847 with lithographs by Apollonia, that Griffith’s work is so widely known and celebrated. Her role is praised in the introduction to the memoirs:we owe the transfer of the landscapes to stone, which add so much to the appearance of the following volume, to the talent and kindness of his sister.

Signed l.l.: F. Grose delin.1771, inscribed u.l. in pencil: Connoisseurs examining an antique Bust, pen and brown ink and wash over traces of pencil on laid paper partially watermarked with the Strasburg Lily, further inscribed with artist’s name and title in a later hand in pencil, verso37.5 x 27.5 cm.; 14 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches, framed size 58 x 46 cm.; 22 3/4 x 18 1/8 inchesThis satirical drawing pokes fun at antiquarianism and art dealing in the late 18th century. Three men examine a bust, the two on the right seem unconvinced of the authenticity of the work, one waving a magnifying glass while the figure in court dress looks a little dubious while the vendor, with two hands resting on the work in proprietorial fashion, seems to be extolling its virtues. Grose treated the subject on other occasions and a print entitled ‘The Antiquerers’ (see below) was made after his work.The British were the foremost buyers of classical antiquities in the 18th and 19th century, with thousands of works, both authentic and undoubtedly fake, shipped over to adorn houses all over the British Isles. The proliferation of dilettantes in the field, and the often totally inexpert practise of what would come to be called ‘connoisseurship’, provided illustrators of the day with plenty of material.The artist was born in Greenford, Middlesex, the son of a Swiss jeweller who modelled George II’s crown. He was a noted amateur draughtsman, but extravagant living exhausted his inherited fortune and forced him to earn an income from his hobby. The results of his regular antiquarian sketching tours were published as The Antiquities of England and Wales, The Antiquities of Scotland and The Antiquities of Ireland between 1773 and his death. He also drew portraits and figurative works, although they are comparatively rare.He was a larger-than-life figure of substantial girth and known as the ‘Greatest Porter Drinker of the Age’. He died suddenly in Dublin and was buried at Drumcondra, where his tombstone records that Grose ‘whilst in cheerful conversation with his friends, expired in their arms without a sigh 18 May 1791 aged 60’.

Stamped l.l.: G. Guillaument, oil on panel, three labels attached to reverse of original frame15.5 x 24 cmProvenanceAlfred Kulka (1868-1926), Jägendorf, bequeathed to his sister Valerie Heissfeld, (1876-1938); Lotte Heissfeld (1907-1983) a Christmas gift from her mother, 1936; On her death left to the mother of the present owner, by descent until 2022Guillaumet was a leading French Orientalist painter. From 1857 he studied under François-Édouard Picot and Félix Barrias at the École des Beaux-Arts. He won the second prize in the Prix de Rome for historical landscape in 1861 and set off for Italy. In Marseille he was delayed by a storm and by chance took a boat for Alger. He was entranced by Algeria and its light. During this first journey he made a large quantity of drawings and studies.Between 1862 and 1884 Guillaumet returned to Algeria on ten or eleven trips, spending several months there each time, travelling around the country, living either in villages, or in Kabyle ksour (fortified villages) or with nomads. He also accompanied French expeditionary columns, as in 1864 and witnessed raids and the repression of insurrections. He wrote of his admiration for the landscape and his empathy for the population. Inspired by Fromentin’s works, he wrote texts about his Oriental experiences that appeared in the 'Nouvelle Revue' starting in 1879 and were later published together in an illustrated volume ‘Tableaux Algériens’ published posthumously in 1888.Guillaumet, who at first had a studio at Sèvres, settled permanently in Paris in 1885. He lived there with Cécile Neinlist (1838-1929) whom he married in 1879 and with whom he had a son, Édouard, born in 1866. He exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1861 to 1880. He enjoyed early success and the French state acquired several of his pictures of rural and nomadic Algeria for the Luxembourg and provincial museums. After his premature death a first retrospective exhibition was organized at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts in 1888. (1)His work may be found in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre. In Algeria, works by him are also on view in the public collections of the National Fine Arts Museum of Alger, at the National Museum Cirta in Constantine and the Zabana National Museum of Oran. He was the subject of a monographic exhibition’ L’Algérie de Gustave Guillaumet (1840-1887)’, (2) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of La Rochelle, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Limoges and at La Piscine in Roubaix (9 March – 2 June 2019).The Kulka-Heissfeld collection was formed by Richard Kulka (1863- 1931) the son of a Jewish industrialist with textile factories in Jägerndorf who moved to Vienna and became a lawyer. The paintings in the collection were mainly 19th and early 20th century landscapes. On his death he left 1/3 of his collection to his sister Adele Kulka and 2/3 to Valerie Heißfeld. Valerie and her daughter Lotte left Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss with some of the collection. They applied for export applications for numerous works of art and succeeded in taking many with them. Lotte succeeded in fleeing to England on 1 March 1939 with around 25 pictures, of which this is one. Her mother and aunt, Adela Kulka, perished at the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.Exposition des œuvres de G. Guillaumet: au profit d’un monument à élever à la mémoire de F. Bonvin, Paris, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 7 to 31 January 1888.[↩]Marie Gautheron (dir.), L’Algérie de Gustave Guillaumet (1840-1887), exh. cat. 2018-2019 Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Rochelle, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Limoges and La Piscine de Roubaix, 2018.[↩]

General Robert Clive receiving the homage of the Nawab Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey c.1761-2Oil on canvas, 20 x 203/4 ins. (50.8 x 60.5 cm)Inscribed indistinctly on stretcher: ‘F.M. Wor… RA’ 1ProvenancePrivate collection, U.S.A., until 2012Literature: Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven & London, 1987) p.123, 177, checklist no.101;The Raj-India and the British, National Portrait Gallery catalogue 1990, ill. p.32, fig.10This is probably a preliminary oil sketch by Hayman for the huge canvas (12 x 15 feet) which formed part of the series of four gigantic pictures illustrating glorious victories from the Seven Years War (1756-63) which were installed in the annex to the Rotunda at Vauxhall Gardens by the proprietor Jonathan Tyers (1702-67).Although much acclaimed at the time of their unveiling in the early 1760s, all four large pictures had disappeared from the Gardens by 1840 (they were almost certainly removed and probably destroyed by that date or soon after) but a lengthy description of the original large pictures was published in a contemporary guidebook to the gardens and in the London press and this source enabled the identification of a larger (presumably subsequent) preliminary sketch for the same subject which is now in the National Portrait Gallery.2 Another rougher version of this subject, was with Spink in the 1970s (K2 3992) and is now in a private collection in the U.K.The subject depicted is the meeting between the victorious General Robert Clive (1725-1774) and Mir Jafar, the Nawab of Bengal (c.1691(?)–1765) after the Battle of Plassey on 23 rd June 1757. Clive was extraordinarily successful in India and, on his return to England in 1760 with an enormous personal fortune, received huge critical acclaim.3In 1756 the Nawab of Oudh, Siraj-ud-Daula, (1733-1757) captured the East India Company’s settlement at Calcutta and imprisoned British captives in the infamous Black Hole. Robert Clive, in command of the Company’s army, recaptured Calcutta in January 1757 and then took the French fort at nearby Chandernagore in March. Clive then deposed Siraj, with the help of Mir Jafar at the Battle of Plassey.Mir Jafar’s rule is usually considered to be the start of British imperialism in India. He had effectively betrayed his predecessor Siraj ud-Dulah (1733-1757) who was killed soon after the battle, in order to become the next Nawab of Bengal. He gave a fortune of around £3 million to the East India Company, but in 1760 Mir Jafar was forced to abdicate in favour of his son-in-law Mir Qasim (d.1777). In 1763 Mir Jafar was restored with the full support of the Company for the remaining two years of his life. In 1764 Clive assumed supreme military and civil power in Bengal and forced the Mughal Emperor Sah ‘Alam to allow him to collect revenue (diwan) on his behalf.It is worth quoting at length from the rather exaggeratedly effusive contemporary description of the large lost picture since the author must have spoken with Hayman to elucidate the subject matter, if indeed the painter himself was not its author: ‘General Clive, after gaining the battle of Plassey in the East Indies, which restored the English interest that had been ruined in those parts of the world, found himself under a necessity of deposing the reigning Nabob; for that purpose sent from the field of battle for Meer Jaffer, a principal General under the Subah or Nabob, and an enemy to the French. Meer Jaffer sent for, seeing the General surrounded by his victorious troops under their arms, approaches him with every symptom of doubt and dissidence in his countenance. The General is represented in the attitude of Friendship, by extending his hands to receive him. Behind the General stands his Aid de Camp with his spontoon in his hand; as bold but as graceful a figure as can well be conceived, the British colours are display’d in the hands of another English officer, with the like appearance as the former, but all of them in different atitudes. A bold horse, supposed to be the General’s that seems startled at the sight of the elephant, closes to the fore ground of this compartment of the picture. It is but justice to the Painter to say, that no figures wereever better detached from the canvas than those are; that of the General, being the principal, is inimitably free, and in a most masterly stile of painting. The painter could with no propriety avoid representing the British figures in their uniform; but to prevent a sameness in the composition, he has with great judgment introduced the Indian groom in the habit of his country, which form a most happy contrast. Meer Jaffer wears on his face strong remains of the emotions already mentioned, but his dejection seems faintly alleviated by the General’s manner of receiving him. The extension of his arms and the inclination of his body is most movingly expressive of doubt, submission and resignation, which is heightened by an Indian officer laying the Subah’s standard at the General’s feet. The future Subah or Nabob is attended by his son, a youth of about eighteen years of age, bewitchingly handsome, and painted with a masterly propriety. The other Indian figures behind Meer Jaffer are those of his friends and officers, and the countenances of them all strongly partake of the inquietudes of their principal. This co[m]partment is terminated by an elephant on the background, which the greatest judges from the East-Indies say is the best they ever saw in a painting, both co[m]partments of the picture (for so they may be called on account of the diversity of the figures they exhibit) are drawn up around the scene of interview. The painter has here taken advantage of the various dresses of the Indians, which, as well as their arms and all their other attributes, are preserved with the utmost precision, to introduce a beautiful play of colours, without departing from propriety.’4 The other two versions and the present picture correspond closely to the published description except that there is no ‘Indian officer laying the Subbah’s standard at the General’s feet’ in either of the two other preparatory works, although the present work has a native with a box which may contain a folded standard. The present work also has a golden ladder and a chair on top of the elephant. Other minor differences between the preparatory works show Clive wearing his tricorn hat in both other versions but hatless in the present picture. In the present picture Mir Jafar is shown bowing more obsequiously than in the larger NPG picture. The NPG picture shows the red banner of the other two pictures turned into a British flag.A letter in the National Library of Wales (Robert Clive Papers H1/1-4) reveals that Clive visited Hayman’s studio on 26 April 1763 when Henry Clive paid 5s to ‘Mr Hamans the painter’. This is recorded in an account book in the handwriting of Henry Clive (1709-1775), who was a first cousin of Clive of India’s father. When Robert Clive came back from India for the second time in 1760, with his young cousinGeorge in attendance, cousin Henry, who was an attorney, seems to have become a kind of steward, travelling with the party and keeping this account book (Dr Charlotte Mitchell kindly shared this information by email in October 2018). This shows that Clive almost certainly commissioned a painting from Hayman and it seems highly likely that he saw the Vauxhall Gardens work and decided that he wanted one for himself.Despite never setting foot in India Hayman was among the first British artists to exploit Indian subject matter, a genre that was to become increasingly popular towards the end of the century in the hands of artists who did travel to the sub-Continent such as Zoffany and Tilly Kettle.1. There is no record of any Royal Academician corresponding to the inscription.2. See A Description of Vaux-Hall Gardens (London, 1762) bound into the end of the BritishLibrary’s copy. See also The Public Advertiser, no.8905 (20 May 1763) and The LondonMagazine, XXXII (May 1763) pp.233-4, quoted by Allen, Francis Hayman (see Literatureabove). The larger sketch in the NPG was correctly identified by Brian Allen as by Haymanwhen it was catalogued by Christie’s as ‘English School’ in an anonymous sale on 22 June 1979(162), bought by the National Portrait Gallery. This work had previously been misidentified asby the American Mather Brown (1761-1831) by Mildred Archer in India and BritishPortraiture 1700-1825 (London, 1979) p.419. For further details of the three other largehistorical pictures see Allen, op.cit., pp.62-93. See Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (London, 1975)4. See A description of Vaux-Hall Gardens (London, 1762) note 2 above.

Pen and grey ink and watercolour on laid paper12 x 9.4 cmThe composition is reminiscent of Liotard’s La Choco - latière, although many of the details are different, notably the style of chair and the arrangement of pots on the tea table. The present drawing shows a tea pot and a silver chocolate pot with a wooden handle, which is probably French. The drawing would appear to be reflecting the status of the subject, as she was unlikely to have been drinking tea and chocolate at the same time.Highmore’s drawings are quite rare, but several examples can be found in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection.Provenance: Sabin Galleries Ltd.

KT 171SOLDWilliam Hoare of Bath (British 1707-1792)Black chalk on laid paper with an unidentified oval watermark14.8 x 19.8 cmProvenanceJohn SuttonHoare, a portraitist in oil and pastel settled in London in the 1720s and was apprenticed to the Flemish painter Giseppe Grisoni. In 1728 he returned to Italy and took Hoare with him. Hoare spent a decade in Italy, studying the Old Masters, meeting British ‘Grand Tourists’, many of whom became future patrons, and perfecting his technique in chalk and pastel.On his return to England he settled in fashionable Bath around 1738, where he remained until his death. He was a founder member of the Royal Academy. This portrait is a charming example of the intimate style Hoare adopted later in his career when painting his family and friends, with rapid, loose strokes which suggest form. It would have been intended as a private image of which very few were worked up into oil paintings.

Signed with monogram and dated 24th. Octr. 57. l.r., watercolour over pencil18.5 x 24.3 cmThis free sketch is a delightful example of Holland’s virtuosity. He first visited Venice in 1835 and was to return throughout the rest of his life, inspired by the beauty of the city, like so many other artists. He valued his own sketches greatly and once commented that parting with a sketch was like parting with a tooth; once sold it cannot be replaced (L. R. Valpy, Memoir of Samuel Palmer, 1881, p. 76).The facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, one of the six great philanthropic confraternities of the Venetian Republic, is by Pietro Lombardo (1435–1515) and Giovanni Buora (1487–90?) and was finished by Mauro Codussi in 1495. The lion of San Marco can be seen in the middle of Holland’s composition. The building is situated next to Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the interior is now occupied by the civic hospital of Venice which stretches to the lagoon.Provenance: Sir Henry Houldsworth, Bt; Leger Galleries Ltd, February 1962; Private collection, UK

Signed l.c.: Howitt, pen and grey ink and watercolour over traces of pencil13 x 18.3 cmThe artist, who married the sister of Thomas Rowlandson, is acclaimed for his country subjects. His animal sketches were frequently done from life.Provenance: Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven (1800– 1973)Henry Rogers Broughton succeeded his older brother, Urban Huttlestone Broughton, as 2nd Baron Fairhaven in 1966. He was born in the United States and was educated at Harrow before joining the Royal Horse Guards in 1920. Both brothers were great collectors, and Henry put together one of the largest twentieth-century collections of paintings, drawings, gouaches and miniatures. He left a large bequest of 120 flower paintings, over 900 watercolours and drawings and 44 volumes of drawings by botanical artists such as Redouté and Ehret to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge – the Broughton Bequest.

Signed and dated l.l.: JM Ince 1846, watercolour over pencil with scratching out and touches of gum arabic21.6 x 35 cm; 8 ½ x 13 ¾ inchesInce has drawn the Abbey from across the Abbey Foregate. He has used some artistic license and reduced the size of the west window and altered the fenestration of the belfry stage by separating the two windows. The surrounding buildings are no longer present today.Ince studied with David Cox in Hereford before moving to London in 1826 when he started to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He moved first to Cambridge and then in the 1830s back to Presteigne in Wales where he was based for the rest of his life.

KT 193SOLDSigned and dated l.l.: JM Ince 1851, watercolour over traces of pencil with stopping and scratching out, touches of bodycolour and gum arabic, inscribed in pencil verso in a later hand: Clovelly town & bay North Devon by Joseph Ince 185122 x 34.5 cmProvenanceThe Fine Art Society Ltd, 48th Exhibition, April 1968, no. 96;Private collection, UKThis very fresh watercolour is a delightful example of a coastal view of one of north Devon’s most picturesque seaside villages, shown here as a busy working fishery.Ince studied with David Cox in Hereford before moving to London in 1826 when he started to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He moved first to Cambridge and then back to Presteigne in Wales in the 1830s where he was based for the rest of his life. His characteristic work is included in the drawings collections of most major museums.

KT531Signed l.r.: J.M. INCE 1839, signed and inscribed verso in pen and brown ink: View in Radnorshire/J. Ince, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and stopping out28 x 43.8 cm.; 11 x 17 inchesThis beautiful watercolour shows the influence of David Cox very clearly.Ince studied with David Cox in Hereford before moving to London in 1826 when he started to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He moved first to Cambridge and then in the 1830s back to Presteigne in Radnorshire, where he was based for the rest of his life.

KT381Signed with monogram l.r., inscribed with title l.l., watercolour with bodycolour and16 x 25 cm; 6 ¼ x 9 ¾ inchesFramed size 35.5 x 42 cm.; 14 x 16 ½ inchesSOLDProvenanceMartin Hardie (1875-1952);Christopher and Rosemary Warren, Bristol until 2020Johnson was born in Birmingham where he studied under Samuel Restell Lines. He was then a pupil of William James Müller in London, accompanying him on Sir Charles Fellowes’ expedition to Lycia in 1843.On Johnson’s return to London he became a founder member of the Clipstone Street Academy, along with Müller, participating in its life drawing and painting sessions with a variety of models from the streets. Johnson made sketching trips with David Cox to North Wales from 1844.The artist was elected an associate member of the R.I. in 1868 and a full member two years later. His work can be found in many museum collections, including the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum.Martin Hardie (1875-1952) was the author of the three-volume bible of British watercolourists Water-Colour Painting in Britain and a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was also an authority on print making on which he published extensively as well as a practising artist in both watercolour and etching.

Inscribed and dated u.l.: Sa Ma de’ Monti/6 May 1781, pencil and grey wash on laid paper18.8 x 26.4 cm; 7 3/8 x 10 3/8 inchesProvenanceIolo Williams (1890-1962);Leger, 1992;Private collection, U.K., purchased from the aboveExhibitedMarble Hill House, Twickenham,Thomas Jones, 1970, no. 52;Leger,British Landscape Painting, 4 March - 3 April,1992, no. 25Thomas Jones was born at Trefonnen near Llandrindod in Radnorshire. At the request of his uncle, he attended Jesus College, Oxford, in order to enter the church, but in 1761 Jones went to London and enrolled at Shipley's drawing school. By March 1763, Jones had decided to pursue landscape painting and persuaded Richard Wilson (1713-1782) to take him as an apprentice. He subsequently established a thriving landscape practice. However, despite his success in London, Jones hankered after Italy.Jones had long wanted to travel to Italy; a favourite project that had been in agitation for some years, and on which my heart was fixed (A.P. Oppé, ed., Memoirs of Thomas Jones , Walpole Society, XXXII, 1946-1948, p. 37). This may have been heightened by the example of Richard Wilson, whose artistic success had been assured by the Italian scenes he painted on his return to England after six years in Rome in the 1750s. Jones had studied and copied his sketches and studies during his apprenticeship. However, for years his trip to the continent had been thwarted by mounting debts and his parents' disapproval of the scheme and Jones did not leave until October 1776.Jones was greatly affected by the changing landscape and light as he travelled through France to Italy. After a brief stay in Florence, he arrived in Rome on 27 November 1776. In his lively and informative memoirs, Jones refers to Wilson’s influence when expressing his joy at travelling through Italy and entering Rome, the: new and uncommon Sensations I was filled [with] on my first traversing this beautiful and picturesque Country ... It appeared Magick Land - In fact I had copied so many Studies of the great Man, & my Old Master, Richard Wilson ... that I insensibly became familiarized with Italian Scenes, and enamoured of Italian forms ( ibid. p. 55).From May 1780 to August 1783 Jones was based in Naples and delighted in the picturesque scenery on the road to Santa Maria dei Monti, a monastery to the east of Naples of which a number of drawings by him are known. He was influenced by the fashionable work of Salvator Rosa, with its treatment of banditti in rocky landscapes. His old friend Francis Towne arrived in Naples in March 1781, and, in his memoirs, Jones describes their trip along the wild road to the monastery : I was able to conduct him to many picturesque scenes of my own discovery, entirely out of the common road of occasional Visiters, either Cavaliers or Artists (Thomas Jones, ibid . p. 102). He drew the road many times- ten are listed in the 1970 Marble Hill catalogue- and further examples are included in the collections of the Tate, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.Two other drawings of the subject executed on 6 May, the same day as the present drawing, one coloured and one pencil and grey wash, are in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. They are of a similar size to the present work and a grey wash drawing (D2002.14) is taken from almost the same spot.Jones further recorded how he felt about this place in his Memoirs on 2nd June 1781 and another incident which he and Towne had experienced: I proceeded to meet Pars..at an Osteria in the road to S’a M’a de Monti- in this hollow Way is a most beautiful series of picturesque Objects, which I discovered by Accident in one of my perambulations-Here may visibly be traced the scenery that Salvator Rosa formed himself on-Only taking away Pine trees, which were, perhaps planted since his time, and which indicate a state of cultivation not suited to his gloomy mind, with the addition of Water and a few Banditti-And every hundred yards present you with a new sand perfect composition of that Master- When Towne was in Naples I took him with me to see this romantic place, with which he seemed much delighted- but the following whimsical incident put a stop to further explorations at that time and which I forgot to mention in its proper place- Proceeding up the valley whose boundaries contracted more and more as we advanced, increasing in proportion the Gloominess of the Scene; We arrived at a Spot, which might very properly have been termed the Land of Darkness & the Shadow of Death…Here, says I, Mr Towne, is Salvator Rosa in perfection we only want Banditti to compleat the picture- I had scarcely uttered these words when turning round a projection of the rocks, we all at once pop’d upon three ugly-looking fellows dressed in the fantastic garb of the Shirri di Campagna, with long knives cutting up a dead jackAss.-…Towne started back as if struck by an electric shock, strongly impressed, I suppose, with our late adventure on the Coast of Baja-‘I’ll go no further’, says he, with a most solemn face, adding with a forced smile, that however he might admire such scenes in a Picture- he did not relish them in Nature- (ibid. pp. 104-5).Thomas Jones’s reputation has soared in recent years, notably after the 2003 landmark exhibition Thomas Jones (1742-1803) An Artist Rediscovered (at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, the National Gallery, London, and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) reinstated his reputation as one of the most idiosyncratic and innovative eighteenth-century British artists.Iolo Williams (1890-1962) was the author of Early English Watercolours (published in 1952), one of the bibles of the field. He left a large part of his collection to the British Museum, but this drawing was held back. He took a keen interest in Welsh matters, serving on the Council of the National Museum of Wales and on the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council.

Signed twice l.r., oil on paper34 x 30.2 cm; 13 2/5 x 11 9/10 inchesFramed in a black polished frameA commission for the Dunlop Rubber Company Limited and used as a full-page advertisement in 1953 to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in numerous publications including ‘The Queen’ and ‘The Illustrated London News’. A copy of one of the advertisements accompanies the painting. The accompanying text reads as follows:‘God Save the Queen. Once again this is a year of splendour for the Abbey in Westminster, which was built for prayer and for the anointing of Kings and Queens. Once again the triumphant trumpets give silver tongue and the people cry out “God Save the Queen” and the soft English daylight gains glory from gold and silver and precious jewels. Here, in this sacred place, time adds rich colour to the tapestry of history, as a new Queen, Elizabeth II, is anointed, crowned and enthroned. When the Queen departs from the Abbey, and the great throng is dispersed and the air is still, the glory will still be there, enshrined in this holy place, guardian of our faith and of our royal Succession.’Kelly was a New Zealand born painter, stage designer, graphic designer, interior designer and illustrator who lived in the UK from 1935. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force as a navigating officer. He began to paint seriously in his spare time, his work influenced by the Surrealists and with a Romantic feel while always meticulously executed. He abandons nature’s topography and reinvents landscapes in a dreamlike world and his interest in architecture is often apparent in his paintings.His first one-man show was at the Lefevre Gallery in 1943, and its success led to another exhibition the following year, when pictures by Lucien Freud and Julian Trevelyan were shown in next door rooms. That year he received a commission to illustrate the art historian and critic Herbert Read’s ‘The Green Child’. Read was an early admirer of Kelly’s work and introduced him to a number of significant clients. The artist exhibited at Arthur Tooth from 1965-1974 and thereafter at Partridge Fine Art.Kelly was commissioned to paint murals and interior decoration in many of England’s most important houses, his good looks and charm fuelling his social popularity. At Castle Howard he executed four murals for the Garden Hall in 1982 and the ‘Kelly car’, a fairground-style train to take visitors around the grounds. His work enjoyed global acclaim, notably in the United States and as far away as Nepal where he decorated a room in the Royal Palace, Kathmandu. He also worked on developing architectural ideas, notably at Henbury Hall where he gothicised ‘The Cave’ for Sebastian de Ferranti and Highgrove where he refaced the Victorian facades and designed new plastered and pedimented frontispieces, returning the house to a more Georgian appearance for the Prince of Wales. He also painted murals in a number of Union Castle and Cunard liners.His work is included in the collections of Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Southampton City Museum, Grosvenor Museum, Chester, Sheffield Museums and the National Trust. The R.W. Norton Art Foundation in Louisiana has a holding of his work and his archive is in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand.LiteraturePaintings by Felix Kelly. Introduction by Herbert Read, London, 1946Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain, Aldershot, 1999Donald Bassett, Fix, The Life and Art of Felix Kelly, Darrow PressDonald Bassett, Felix Kelly, Herbert Read and Neo-Romanticism, British Art Journal - Vol. 8 No. 2, September 2007

Signed and inscribed l.r.: Laura Knight/1946, Nuremberg, charcoal and watercolour56 x 38 cm.; 22 x 15 inchesProvenanceSotheby’s, Olympia 4 July 2002, lot 237, where bought by the present owner;Private collection, U.K.ExhibitedLaura Knight: A Panoramic View, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 9 October 2021-20 February 2022, ill. p. 190Knight suggested painting the Nuremberg Trial to the War Artists Advisory Committee in December 1945, and in early 1946 she flew to Frankfurt.The War Crimes Trial for Nazi war criminals was held in the Central Courts of Justice in Nuremberg. Knight attended the trial and made studies from a press box. She made several sketches for the finished oil (in the Imperial War Museum) and her letters to her husband Harold express the intense emotion generated at the Trial:‘I am trying my hardest for a dynamic and rather terrible build-up of the design, hoping that the placing of the masses, even apart from the detail, will convey in some way the sensation that not only I but everyone appears to feel… in it there is much pity- pity perhaps that the human creature could sink to such baseness as these poor creatures have done’.This drawing shows the back row of prisoners at the trial with Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, Foreign Minister until 1938, and Hans Fritzche, the broadcaster and head of the radio division, at the very end of the row. Speer, Hitler’s favoured architect and Minister of Armaments was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment and Von Neurath to fifteen years. Fritzsche was acquitted.Hermann Goering was the end of the first row of prisoners with his own guard, next to Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Wilhelm Frick, Walther Funk and Hjalmar Schacht. At the other end of the back row, depicted in this drawing, sat Karl Doenitz, and next to him Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen and Arthur Seyss-Inquart.Two less finished sketches for the Nuremberg Trial are currently on loan to the Ben Uri Gallery, London.

Signed and dated l.r.: Laura Knight/1958, graphite and black chalk on paper partially watermarked J WHATMAN, framed in a black painted frame25.5 x 36 cm.; 10 x 14 inchesFramed size 43.5 x 56 cm.; 17 1/8 x 22 inchesThe apparent Japanese influence on this drawing can also be seen in an oil of a tree with a landscape entitled ‘A Misty Sunrise’ painted in 1956 and in the collection of the Royal Academy (03/1161). Knight had a lifelong interest in trees and landscape.This drawing may have been done in the Malvern Hills where the artist and her husband Harold spent some time in the summer of 1958.

Signed and dated l.r.: Laura Knight/Dec 1923, watercolour and black chalkSight size 41.2 x 33 cm.; 16 1⁄4 x 13 inchesWhole sheet 45.6 x 39.5 cm; 41.2 x 15 1⁄2 inches; 16 1⁄2 x 15 1⁄2 inchesProvenancePrivate collection, U.K.ExhibitedMK Gallery, Milton Keynes, Laura Knight a panoramic view, 2021, ill. p. 144;Nottingham Castle Museum, Laura Knight & Caroline Walker: A Female Gaze, 2021 (no catalogue)LiteratureEd. Fay Blanchard & Anthony Spira, Laura Knight A panoramic view, 2022, ill. p. 144This striking work by Laura Knight was drawn in 1923 and is a notable example of her ‘female gaze’. Her portrait drawings of women are invariably strong and vital. Here, she adds emphasis with her trademark black chalk creating strong lines, which contrast with the vivid background in blue watercolour.It has been suggested that the sitter was Lilian Ryan, who was married to Sir Gerald Festus Kelly, one of the most fashionable society portraitists in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century and president of the Royal Academy from 1949 to 1954. During Kelly’s tenure as President, Lilian ‘Jane’ Ryan, as she was more commonly known, exhibited under the alias ‘Lilian Jelly’ to avoid accusations of cronyism.From a working-class family, Ryan (c.1898 – c.1980) had been a model for Sir George Clausen in the 1910s, and he introduced her to Gerald Kelly in 1916. They were to marry four years later and spend over fifty happy years together: indeed, Gerald painted her portrait at least fifty times, exhibiting each year at the Royal Academy and titling them ‘Jane,’ his nickname for his wife. Her many likenesses became so recognisable that when Queen Mary was introduced to her, she exclaimed “Jane, of the many Janes!”.Lilian took an interest in painting for herself in the early 1940s, and her husband encouraged her curiosity. She had a natural affinity to oils and she advanced quickly and exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1944, continuing to exhibit there for thirty years.In 1936 Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its foundation in 1768. She battled against the structural inequalities of the art world throughout her professional life, from when she was excluded from the life room at Nottingham School of Art in 1891. In 1922 she wrote a pamphlet entitled Can Women Succeed as Artists where she identified inequality of opportunity as a major factor in the near exclusion of women from the arts in Britain. In 1937, she became the first woman to join the selection committee of the R.A., but was not invited to its annual banquet until 1967.Knight campaigned for greater recognition and status for women in the arts throughout her career and was President of the Society of Women Artists from 1932-1968. Throughout her life she took the opportunity to promote herself and her work, fight for equal renumeration and obtain high-profile commissions.

Signed l.r.: Laura Knight, watercolour over pencil 56 x 38 cm.; 22 x 15 inchesProvenancePolak Gallery, London;Christie’s, London, 23 June 1994, lot 9;Private collection U.K.;Sotheby’s, London, 13 December 2018, lot 85, where bought by the present ownerLiteratureJanet Dunbar, Laura Knight, 1975, ill. facing p. 104The subject of this watercolour is Eileen Mayo (1906-1994) depicted as a ballerina. Mayo was an artist and a favourite model of both Laura Knight and Dod Proctor. The work combines Knight’s frank depiction of the female form with her love of the stage and was drawn in the studio rather than at the theatre.Knight’s interest in ballerina’s dressing rooms started in 1919 when she was invited to draw Lopokova, the star of Diaghilev’s ballet at the Coliseum in No. 1 Dressing Room, which gives the present work its title. In her autobiography, Knight describes her fascination with the glow of the electric bulbs, the ballet shoes and the scent of powder and grease paint, and how she was allowed to sit and observe as much as she desired (L. Knight Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, pp. 224-232).Knight worked on an oil of Mayo as a ballerina in 1927, entitled ‘Dressing for the Ballet’ and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy that year. The work was included in Knight’s touring exhibition of the United States in 1931 and was badly damaged, so she cut it down and completely repainted the original. The new composition called ‘No. 1 Dressing Room’, featuring Mayo topless in the identical pink tights and doing her hair in front of the mirror in an extended interior was re-exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1947 and bought by the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool.Excluded from the life room at Nottingham School of Art in 1891, she battled against the structural inequalities of the art world throughout her professional life and fought for greater recognition and status for women in the arts throughout her career.In 1922 she wrote a pamphlet entitled Can Women Succeed as Artists where she identified inequality of opportunity as a major factor in the near-total exclusion of women from the arts in Britain. In 1936 Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its foundation in 1768. She was President of the Society of Women Artists from 1932 to 1968. While she became the first woman to join the selection committee of the Royal Academy in 1937, Knight was not invited to its annual banquet until 1967.

Watercolour over pencil on laid paper 37.5 x 53 cm.; 14 3⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inchesFrame size 60 x 74.5 cm; 23 5/8 x 29 1⁄4 inchesProvenance: Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd.Exhibited: Lupton’s Gallery, Eton College, 27 May – 10 September 2009, no. 11Labruzzi, the son of a weaver, studied at, and was later received into, the prestigious Accademia di San Luca, one of the few Italians in Rome who worked mainly as a landscape artist. His studio was one of those usually visited by British Grand Tourists and his work enjoyed contemporary popularity and commercial success.He accompanied the antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838), of Stourhead in Wiltshire, along the Via Appia from Rome to Brindisi in 1789, commissioned to sketch the monuments along the way. Bad weather and Labruzzi’s ill-health stopped the trip however, and the project was never completed, but he drew over two hundred and fifty views. His patron had intended to publish an account of the journey with prints and had the drawings bound in five volumes. Labruzzi made some more finished drawings in sepia, some modified for reproduction, and twenty-four plates etched by him were issued by Colt Hoare as 'Via Appia illustrate ab Urbe Romam ad Capuam', published in 1794 (see Timothy Clifford, 'Carlo Labruzzi the Grand Tour', 2012, Dickinson exhibition catalogue).