Alfred William Strutt A lioness

KT734 Edward Lear (British 1812-1888) Sunset at Philae, Egypt Inscribed and dated l.r.: Philae. Feby. 3. 1854/from Biggeh. Sunset. P 18 and extensively further inscribed with colour notes, pen and brown ink and watercolour over traces of pencil 33 x 50 cm.; 13 x 19 ¾ inches Provenance Appleby Brothers, 27 William IV Street, Trafalgar Square, London, no. M2139; Private collection, U.K. until 2026 Lear visited Philae for the second time in late January and early February 1854. He had intended to travel up the Nile with the artist Holman Hunt but left Cairo earlier than expected when the opportunity arose after Christmas 1853, having met Thomas Seddon (1821-1856) and the explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890). His views of the island were often taken from a vantage point which situated it in the landscape, showing the First Cataract, the rocky barrier that divided ancient Egypt from Nubia and the Nile. Here he enjoys painting the rocks in different shades of grey as the sun goes down, its light illuminating the temple with a golden glow. Lear spent ten days exploring the island and set up camp in the Temple of Isis. Many parties of English travellers visited, and Lear entertained some of them with dinner and music on the Temple Terrace. He adored the place and wrote that it was ‘more like a real fairy island than anything else I can compare it to. It is very small, & was formerly all covered with temples, of which the ruins of 5 or 6 now only remain. The great Temple of Isis, on the terrace of which I am now writing, is so extremely wonderful that no words can give the least idea of it. The Nile is divided here into several channels, by other rocky islands, & beyond you see the desert & the great granite hills of Assouan’ (Lear in a letter to his sister Ann, 7th February 1854, quoted in V. Noakes, ‘Edward Lear’, 1988, p, 124). He made many drawings of Philae, including a similar work dated a day later, 4 February 1854, from a different vantage point which is in the Ashmolean Museum. Lear painted Philae in oils around twenty times. He wrote on his 1867 trip that ‘In no place- it seems to me, can the variety & simplicity of colours be so well studied as in Egypt; in no place are the various beauties of shadow more observable, or more interminably numerous (Diary, 25.ii.67). Bigeh is an island and archaeological site in the Nile, formerly in the First Cataract of the river and it controlled the access to ancient Upper Egypt and Nubia. It was sacred to the ancient Egyptians who believed that Osiris was buried on the island. Its sacred temple was only accessible to priests. When the construction of the Aswan Dam began in 1960, it became apparent that the ancient temples and surrounding area would be submerged and destroyed by the rising waters of the newly created Lake Nasser. An international fund-raising campaign by UNESCO led to their relocation to higher ground by 1968.

Signed and dated u.r.: Mancinelli/Geny (?). 1882, pencil 16.8 x 14.3 cm; 6.6 x 5.6 inches Provenance: David M. Daniels and Stevan Beck Baloga, their sale at Sotheby’s 29 October 2002, lot 116 Exhibited: Shepherd Gallery, R.J.M. Olsen, ‘Italian 19th Century Drawings and Watercolours, An Album: Camuccini & Minardi to Mancini & Balla,’, Spring 1976, no. 155, ill. p. 45; The American Federation of Arts, ‘Italian Drawings 1780-1890’, March 1980-January 1981, no 84 This is an exceptionally fine drawing by this Italian portrait painter who lived for most of his life in Naples where he was honorary Professor of the Institute of Fine Arts. His subjects included Umberto I and Margherita di Savoia (1884) and other Italian aristocrats, as well as Orientalist and historical work.

Signed with monogram l.r., inscribed l.l.: near Calikut., watercolour heightened with touches of bodycolour Provenance Franklin Lushington (1823-1901) and thence by descent Lear was invited to India by his friend and patron Lord Northbrook who was appointed Viceroy in 1871, and his journey there was the last and longest of his life. He was overwhelmed by the colour and vitality of India and enjoyed the bustle of Viceregal life. Calicut, or present-day Kozhikode, is on the Malabar coast in Kerala and was a centre of the Indian spice trade. Edward Lear arrived there in October 1874, just as the monsoon began. He was warned about the dangers of contracting fever but stayed, despite the pouring rain, until the skies were clear enough to draw. He described the roads around the city as “of such redundant beauty one can hardly dream.” Franklin Lushington, Lear’s close friend and first owner of this drawing, was the son of Edmund Henry Lushington. He was appointed judge to the Supreme Court of Justice in the Ionian Islands in 1855 and Lear went with him to live in Corfu. They first met in Malta in 1849, where Franklin’s elder brother Henry was Chief Secretary to the government. On his death, Lear left all his papers to Lushington, who later destroyed most of them.

Pencil on laid paper, partially watermarked and countermarked 1819 14.5 x 10.9 cm.; 5 ¾ x 4 ¼ inches Provenance: Cyril and Shirley Fry until 2021 Literature: J. Witt, 'William Henry Hunt (1790-1864)', 1982, no. 369 Exhibited: 'Hunt Exhibition Fry Collection', 1967, no. 17 (2) This work dates from c. 1820.

Oil on panel 22 x 27 cm.; 8 ¾ x 10 5/8 inches Provenance The artist’s widow, Lady Kelly; Michael Parkin Fine Art Ltd; From whom purchased by J.G. Cluff, private collection U.K. until 2022 Born in London of Irish descent, Kelly was educated at Cambridge University, later living and studying art in Paris where he met Degas, Monet, Renoir and Sickert. Whistler was also an early influence as were Cézanne and Gaugin. Kelly was an enthusiastic traveller, visiting many countries from Egypt to China. His sketches of his travels are pleasingly spontaneous and tend to be painted more freely than his finished portraits. He became a successful society portraitist whose sitters included Somerset Maugham, whom he painted several times, and he undertook numerous state portraits. Kelly is represented in many public collections, including the Tate, which holds seven works. He had retrospective exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in 1950 and in 1957 at the RA. He was elected RA in 1930, was the Academy's Keeper from 1943-45 and President, defeating Augustus John in the election, from 1949-54. Kelly held a number of official positions, such as membership of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, 1938-43, and was knighted in 1945. Between 1909 and 1970 Kelly exhibited over 300 works at the RA. During his lifetime his work became well known through popular prints.

KT311 b Signed and inscribed on original mount: La Porte./Keswick Lake-/Pocklington Island./Crosthwaite Church./Skiddaw, watercolour over pencil 22.7 x 37.7 cm; 9 x 14 7/8 inches Provenance: Christie’s, London, 17 November 1970, lot 10;The Pemberton collection bought from the above sale, until 2019 Laporte was a drawing master who exhibited work at the Royal Academy and British Institution from 1779. Dr Thomas Monro was one of his pupils. He published several manuals on landscape watercolour painting, the most famous of which 'The Progress of a Water-Coloured Drawing', c. 1802, went into several editions. It showed fourteen stages in the outline and colouring of a watercolour. He visited the Lakes in the 1790s and there are a number of drawings by him in the collection of The Wordsworth Trust, of which several are of Derwentwater. His work can also be found in the collections of the Tate, the British Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery.

KT636 Watercolour over traces of pencil with touches of gum arabic and scratching out 21 x 29 cm.; 8 ¼ x 11 3/8 inches Provenance Agnew’s, (1891); Private collection, Herefordshire until 2024 Samuel Jackson has been described as ‘the Father of the School’ of Bristol artists. His contemporary Francis Danby (1793-1861) wrote that ‘I know Jackson is a man of genius by being with him in Leigh Woods’ (see F. Greenacre and S. Stodard, ‘The Bristol Landscape-the Watercolours of Samuel Jackson’, 1986, p. 85). In 1820s Bristol was booming, the end of the Napoleonic Wars contributing to its prosperity as a trading city, the port of Bristol second only to London. This was the moment the ‘Bristol School of Artists’ flourished; Jackson and Francis Danby were its best-known members. Their original contribution to art in Britain was founded in their plein air practise in the countryside around the city, Leigh Woods, the Nightingale Valley and the Avon Gorge. Jackson was born in Bristol, the son of a partner in a firm of dry-salters with a Dutch grandmother, who dealt in the chemical products used in colour dyes and artists materials. It may be that in this business was the origin of the wide variety of pigments used in much of Jackson’s early work. Like many other Bristol artists Jackson travelled extensively and made frequent trips to Wales from 1825 through the 1830s and 1840s. In 1827 he visited Trinidad, St Vincent and Tobago in the West Indies. Scotland, the Lake District and Switzerland provided further subjects for his exhibited works. He lived in Bristol for his whole life becoming the elder statesman of the arts in the city. Jackson’s work is well represented at the British Museum, Bristol City Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art amongst other institutions.

Signed with initials in pencil l.r.: HBB, watercolour 24 x 17 cm.; 9 ½ x 6 ¾ inches Provenance Pietro Raffo, until 2022 £2200 This watercolour shows the influence of J.M.W. Turner, whose watercolour studies were copied by Brabazon.

KT523 Pen and grey ink and watercolour over pencil on laid paper watermarked J WHATMAN, inscribed verso in pencil: Inscribed on old mount/near Chepstow/William Day 30x 39 cm.; 11 ¾ x 15 3/8 inches Provenance Cyril Fry This exceptionally fresh drawing is a lovely example of the work of William Day, an accomplished amateur artist, who exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1782 and 1801 as an Honorary Exhibitor. The late Judy Egerton wrote an article about him in The Connoisseur, July 1970, pp. 176-185. It is not known for certain when Day met John Webber, the Swiss-born artist who is famous for accompanying Captain Cook on his last expedition to the South Seas between 1776 and 1780. The Connoisseur article notes, without giving a source, that the friendship between the two artists “began about 1787”. Day and Webber were sketching together in the Wye valley in 1788, which is the first time that pairs of views by the two artists of the same subject are known to exist. Two watercolours by Webber of Chepstow Castle dated 1788, which are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (D.1900.12 & D.1970.77) (see Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in the Whitworth Art Gallery, 2003, p. 282) correspond to two watercolours by Day which were acquired by Chepstow Museum in 2012. A family note lists Day’s interest in the following order:’ Geology, Minerology and Painting’ and he formed one of the earliest private collections of minerals in England. His collection was carried on by his son William Day (1797-1849) and his grandson and passed to the Hampstead Central Library where it was destroyed by bombing during WWII.

Inscribed (recto): T Von Holst, pencil and pen and brown ink, verso: pencil, on laid paper with a partial Strasburg Lily watermark, laid down on a brown sheet numbered 10 27.2 x 21.4 cm; 10 3⁄4 x 8 1⁄2 inches Provenance John Welch Etherington Rolls (1807-1870); By family descent to Lady Shelley Rolls, her sale at Sotheby’s, London,12 June 1959; P. & D. Colnaghi; Private collection U.K. until 2019 Von Holst’s drawing of the seated woman, recto, is after a figure in Raphael’s ‘Miraculous Draft of Fishes’; the drawing for the tapestry cartoon is in the Albertina, Vienna. A print was made after the drawing, which von Holst probably copied. The figure of the standing female on the recto is a characteristic Holst pose, derived from Vincenzo Danti’s bronze statue of Venus in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (see Max Browne, The Romantic Art of Theodor von Holst 1810-44, 1994, p.15). The drawing on the verso illustrates a scene inspired by a Gothic novel such as The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, published in 1794. One of the most popular novels of its day, its main character Emily St. Aubert, a virtuous and beautiful young woman, undertakes a series of dramatic adventures; she escapes from captivity at the hands of a cruel villain in a brooding castle to freedom. The brown card inlay on which the present drawing is contained is from the Rolls album, a large leather-bound album which forms the largest-known group of drawings by the artist. The family lived at The Hendre in Monmouthshire, where they also had at least five oils by von Holst. They were also involved with the theatre and opened their own in the grounds. The pencil inscription “T. Von Holst’ appears on almost all the drawings in the album and is effectively its collection mark.