Sarah Bowdich Carp

Signed with initials and inscribed verso: Library Fairford Park ArB, watercolour over pencil19.2 x 21.3 cmIn the collection of the Sir John Soane’s Museum are Soane’s working drawings showing alternatives for John Raymond-Barker for the library dating from 1789–90 (SM (3) 80/1/66 recto and verso (4) 81/2/98). They comprise three drawings on two sheets and a survey plan by John Sanders, a pupil from 1784 to 1789. Augusta Raymond-Barker, a keen watercolourist, married Colonel Sir Lumsley-Graham, Bt (1828–90). He fought in the Kaffir War of 1853 and the Crimean War.Provenance: Augusta Raymond-Barker, Fairford Park, Gloucestershire; thence by family descent until 2016

Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: Nina Hamnett/Oct 1924/Paris, pencil, partial watermark ENGLAND25.4 x 25.7 cm.; 10 x 10 1/8 inchesProvenanceBy family descent until 2024This may be a portrait of Mary Torr, painted in oils by Hamnett in 1924.The daughter of an army officer, Hamnett was born in Wales and had a peripatetic childhood, showing early talent for drawing and painting. In 1911 she set up a studio in Grafton Street in Fitzrovia. Throughout her early career she worked at the Omega Workshops and was well known on the London art scene. Hamnett moved to Paris in 1913 and lived in Montparnasse. She attended Marie Wassilieff's academy where she had lessons with Fernand Leger, worked as an artist’s model and met Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Gertrude Stein.She was at the heart of the Anglo-French exchange of artistic ideas at this period and came and went between Paris and London. Hamnett was back in France in 1920 enjoying the Bohemian life of the French capital with other artists and seeking out the avant-garde.One of Hamnett’s first solo exhibitions was held at the Eldar Gallery, London in 1918 and consisted mainly of portraits of figures she had met in Paris.Hamnett, dubbed the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ is now recognised as a leading proponent of British Modernism and a retrospective of her work, including many drawings, was held at Charleston in 2021.The grandmother of the previous owner and her husband used to frequent the Fitzroy Tavern and drink with the artists and intellectuals who were regulars there.

Signed l.l.: Louise Rayner, watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour and gum arabic46.5 x 33 cm.; 18 3/8 x 13 inchesThe artist was born in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire, the daughter of Samuel and Ann Rayner who were both professional artists. The most talented of six children, who all worked as artists, Louise studied painting from the age of fifteen, first with her father, and subsequently with George Cattermole, Edward Nieman, David Roberts and Frank Stone.She specialised in watercolour and her streetscapes capture the flavour of city life in 1870s and 1880s and are architecturally detailed.In 1851, when Louise was ten, the family moved to London and, except when travelling, she spent much of her life there. She would often accompany her architect brother Richard on his business trips and paint . As a result, Louise was widely travelled, both in Britain and in northern France. She most enjoyed visiting old cathedral cities and market towns, and is acclaimed for her views of Chester, London, Hastings, Tewksbury, Warwick, Edinburgh, Wrexham, Shrewsbury as well as Salisbury.By 1865 she had moved to Chester where she spent many years working and teaching painting. She lodged at the home of Robert Shearing (who owned a chemist's shop in Watergate Street) and his wife Mary Anne at 2 Ash Grove, in what was then a secluded rural location outside the city.In 1910, she and her sister Margaret, who had lodged with her for a time in Chester, moved to Tunbridge Wells. When Margaret died, in 1920, Louise moved for the last time to Southwater Road, St Leonard's-on-Sea, Sussex, and died there on 8th October 1924, aged 92. She never married.For over half a century, Louise was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the Old and the New Watercolour Societies, the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street Gallery, the British Institution, the Society of Female Artists, the Dudley Gallery, the Birmingham Society of Artists and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.Her work can be found in many public collections including the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, Derby Museum and Art Gallery and the Salisbury Museum.

Inscribed on mount: Fairford/Miss Bosanquet, watercolour over traces of pencil19.5 x 30.5 cm; 7 3/4 x 12 1/8 inchesProvenanceAugusta Raymond-Barker, Fairford Park; By family descent until 2016Harriet Bosanquet, (1798-1830) daughter of William Bosanquet, a banker, married John Raymond-Barker of Fairford Park on 6 May 1823. They had two daughters, Augusta b. 1827 and Leonora, b. 1829, presumably the two girls in purple dresses in this watercolour. The drawing is by her sister Charlotte, the girls’ aunt. Charlotte Bosanquet was a talented artist of interiors and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford have an extensive collection of her work. When their father William Bosanquet died in 1840 Charlotte was left unexpectedly impoverished and moved from house to house staying with members of her extended Hugenot family, building up what amounted to a pictorial diary of her movements amongst the many branches of the family, usually depicting the libraries, halls, or drawing rooms of their houses. One of her sketchbooks is entitled ‘The Bosanqueti – a selection of Several Mansion Houses, Villas, Lodges, Parks, etc., the principal residences of a distinguished Family with descriptive notes’ (see Cherry, Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 131).Fairford Park was built for Andrew Barker in 1661-2 by Valentine Strong (d.1662 and completed by Strong's eldest son Thomas) and the design is known only from Kip's engraved bird's eye view of about 1710. The house was altered circa 1740 and the grounds circa 1750-60 to Rococo taste.[ ’This almost perfect Restoration composition was however much altered in the C18; the house c. 1740 and the grounds c. 1750-60 to Rococo taste ...' (D.Verey & A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 1: the Cotswolds, 3rd ed., 1999, pp.369-70].Soane remodelled the house for John Raymond Barker in 1789-90. His Journal No. 1, in the Sir John Soane’s Museum, has an entry for 22 May 1789: 'Sanders went to Fairford this Eveng / to take plans of the House / & Offices; retd the 26', other entries follow and finish with 'Received in full April 1791 £227:8:6’. Soane’s changes to this room seem to have been restricted to the chimney piece and the cornice, and the bookcases seen framing the composition of this watercolour. (A drawing for the chimneypiece of the drawing room is in the Sir John Soane's Museum).After use as an American military hospital during the war, the family sold Fairford House in 1945 and the house (not the estate) was eventually bought by Gloucestershire County Council and became the site for Farmor's Comprehensive School.

Signed and inscribed on pink ribbon: Mrs Withers 26 Grove Place. Delt., watercolour with gum arabic12 x 23.9 cm; 4 3⁄4 x 9 3⁄8 inchesProvenance: Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven (1800– 1973)Augusta Innes Withers, the daughter of a Chaplain to the Prince Regent, was born in Cheltenham. She was well known to contemporaries and widely praised for her botanical and bird pictures, characterised by her meticulously detailed and accurate work which is beautifully exemplified in the present drawing. Withers exhibited widely, at the Royal Academy in London from 1829 to 1846, the Royal Society of British Artists where she showed sixty-eight works between 1832–65 and the New Society of Painters in Water Colours. She was one of the earliest members of the Society of Women Artists where she exhibited forty-three works from 1857–75.Withers was appointed flower painter to Queen Adelaide in 1833, flower and fruit painter to Queen Victoria in 1864 and is listed as a painter to the Horticultural Society.In 1822 she married Theodore Withers (1782–1869), an accountant from Middlesex. The couple lived mainly in London and had at least two children, Theodore (b. 1823) and Augusta (b. 1825).Withers contributed to a large number of publications including The Botanist, John Lindley’s Pomonological Magazine and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. She illustrated Robert Thompson’s The Gardener’s Assistant, 1859 and collaborated with Sarah Drake on James Bateman’s Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala.Three of Withers’ works are in the Natural History Museum, London, and a large number of her original watercolours are held in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society.Henry Rogers Broughton succeeded his older brother Urban Huttlestone Broughton as the 2nd Lord Fairhaven in 1966. He was born in the United States and 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 one hundred and twenty ower paintings, over nine hundred watercolours and drawings and forty- four volumes of drawings by botanical artists such as Redouté and Ehret to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in the Broughton Bequest.

On parchment with burnished gold illumination, the title page signed in pencil: Mary H. Robinson, further inscribed in another hand Illumination by Mary Heath Robinson/sister of WHR, the artist’s name label attached to inside back cover, bound in marbled boards with green leather and gilt tooling stamped CHERRY RIPE24 x 33 cm.; 9 ½ x 13 inchesProvenanceMr and Mrs T.L. Robinson (lent to an unidentified exhibition as no. 211);By family descent until 2024The famous song Cherry Ripe was written by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and the music is by Charles E. Horn (1786-1849).Mary Robinson, the sister of William Heath Robinson, was a talented calligrapher and illustrator and occasional metal sculptor. She was taught by Charles Edward Johnson (1832-1913), a member of the Royal Society of Painter in Watercolours, as was her brother Charles Robinson. She became a member of the Royal Society of Scribes and Illustrators in 1921.Her brother William praises her skill in his autobiography, My Line of Life, 1938:’My sister has, I believe, found a great consolation in the work that now occupies her all her lifetime. Her writing and illumination are sometimes exquisite’, pp. 164-65. Mary devoted some of her life to nursing her mother and sister.

Pastel, inscribed on reverse of original backboard: Anna Tonelli/fece in Londra/1796, in the original frame bearing the inscription Anna Tonelli H.D.Hamilton 179626.1 x 22.6 cm.; 10 ¼ x 8 7/8 inchesProvenanceMellors & Kirk, Nottingham, 9-10 June 2011, lot 713 (as of Tonelli by Hugh Douglas Hamilton);Private collection, U.K. until 2022LiteratureN. Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edition, no. J.722.167Anna Tonelli, née Nistri, was probably trained in Florence, possibly by Giuseppe Piattoli (1743-1823) with whom she collaborated on a portrait of the family of Granduca Pietro Leopoldo, which was engraved in 1785. At some stage before 1785 she married the virtuoso violinist Luigi Tonelli. It seems highly likely that she came across the work of Hugh Douglas Hamilton in Rome.Tonelli met Lord Clive, ‘Clive of India’, while he was travelling in Italy, and he employed her to make pastels of members of his family. From 1794 she taught drawing to his children in London. She exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794 and 1797, giving her address as 97 Norton Street. The artist travelled with the Clive family to India between 1798 and 1801, moving around southern India with Lady Clive and her daughters. During her time in the subcontinent, she seems to have worked in watercolour or miniature, rather than pastel, and charged twelve to thirty guineas for a miniature. She painted the Rajah of Tanjore and Tipu Sultan on this trip. She returned to Florence in 1801.Tonelli’s work has been confused with that of Hugh Douglas Hamilton, which may account for the inscription on the frame. She is known to have copied his work for Lord Clive, producing portraits in 1790s to add to a series begun by Hamilton. It seems unlikely that Hamilton has any connection with the present work, as he had returned to Ireland by this date.In 1806 the American agent in Paris, Filippo Mazzei, engaged her to bring up his daughter Elisabetta. He provided a description of the family to Thomas Jefferson (letter, 20th July 1806) with a view to their emigrating to the USA, praising the father, a violinist ‘the peer of any other’, the two children (born c.1789–90), and the mother who ‘sings and plays the piano like an expert; knows very well her own language, French, and English; draws and paints with excellent taste; is accomplished in embroidery and all needlework; and knows geography quite well.’ Jefferson’s response highlighted the expense of living in a major city, which may have deterred the family, as by 2 November 1807 they were in Pisa with Mazzei, while by 1809 they seem to have returned to Florence.I am grateful to Neil Jeffares for his biographical information about the artist.

Signed and dated l.r.: S:Stone 1788, inscribed in pen and brown ink verso: Sam: Lysons., watercolour with gum arabic and touches of bodycolour on wove paper37 x 30 cm.; 14 1⁄2 x 11 3⁄4 inchesProvenanceProbably Samuel Lysons, FSA (1763-1819);Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven (1900-1973);By family descent;Sotheby’s, London, sale of the Library of Henry Rogers Broughton, 2nd Baron Fairhaven, Part II, 29 November 2022, lot 478Sarah Stone was the first female British painter of birds and animals to achieve professional recognition. Her drawings of birds are a highly important visual record of the specimens held in collections in late eighteenth-century England, and include some of specimens collected on the voyages of Captain Cook.The Mandarin drake from China (Aix galericulata) is shown raising the fan-shaped, cinnamon coloured innermost pair of secondary wings on his back like sails in a courting gesture. Stone evidently admired the Mandarin duck as she made several versions of the present drawing. One is in the Natural History Museum, London (see Christine Jackson, Sarah Stone Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds, 1998, p. 113, NHML no. 54, ill. Pl. 54 p. 81). Another, smaller version dated 1781 (in poor condition) was sold at Bonhams, London, 12 October 2022, lot 3.Stone was employed when she was still in her mid-teens to draw the objects in the Holophusican or Leverian Museum, a major cultural institution of the day housed in the former royal palace of Leicester House. She was to work there for nearly thirty years. Its owner, Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) commissioned her by 1777 to record specimens and ethnographic material brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East.For financial reasons, Lever had to dispose of his collection in the 1780s, by lottery. Before doing so, he apparently commissioned Sarah Stone to depict the birds, ethnography and antiquities. From January to March 1784 Lever exhibited Stone’s work, advertising the show as:‘a large Room of Transparent Drawings from the most curious specimens in the collection, consisting of above one thousand different articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond imagination. These will continue to be open for the inspection of the public until they are removed into the country. Admittance HALF-A-CROWN each...Good fires in all the galleries.’ (See C. Jackson, ibid, p. 22).Lever kept Stone’s drawings after the exhibition. The Leverian Museum continued to grow under new ownership through the 1780s and 1790s, and Stone continued to work there.Stone drew items from other private collections and the British Museum. As most of the actual specimens have not survived, her drawings are a vital record of contemporary collections, few of which produced catalogues, and give valuable insight into the collecting practises of Enlightenment museums.Sarah’s father James Stone was a fan painter, and it is likely that Sarah assisted him. As a child she was taught to make her own pigments using natural ingredients. She practised working in bodycolour as well as watercolour as a child, and the exquisite brushwork which can be seen in the drawing of the feathers of the duck demonstrates her skill at using bodycolour and gum arabic to intensify the colours.Stone exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1781, 1785 and 1786. She exhibited paintings of birds at the Society of Artists in 1791. She married John Langdale Smith, a midshipman, on 8 September 1789; she exhibited as a ‘painter’ before her marriage and in her married name as an ‘Honorary Exhibitor.’ She painted less after her marriage, predominately drawing live birds which her husband, also an artist, brought back from his travels.Stone was twenty seven when she married. A, daughter Eliza, who probably died in infancy, was baptised in September 1792 at St John the Evangelist, Westminster. A son, Henry Stone Smith (1795-1881) was baptised in the same church in March 1795. The family has a note by him recording a bird ‘Topial’, probably a troupial, which was brought back from the West Indies by his father and lived with the family (see C. Jackson, ibid, p. 30).Further examples of Stone’s watercolours can be found in the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, London, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the Yale Center for British Art, the Getty, the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii and the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand.Paris Spies-Gans has written about Stone’s participation in the imperial project in Paul Mellon Centre Notes, No. 20, ‘Colonialism in the Photographic Archive’, January 2022, pp. 11-12).Samuel Lysons, FSA (1763-1819)The inscription on the reverse of the drawing suggests it was owned by Samuel Lysons, FSA. Lysons was a Gloucestershire antiquarian, engraver and archaeologist, whose interests centred on Roman archaeology and mosaics and Gloucestershire church architecture. He was the Director of the Society of Antiquaries from 1798 to 1809. He illustrated his brother Daniel Lysons’ Environs of London, and the two collaborated on Magna Britannia, Being a Concise Topographical Account of the Several Counties of Great Britain, published in several volumes from 1806 to 1822.Henry Rogers Broughton (1900-1973)Henry Rogers Broughton succeeded his older brother Urban Huttlestone Broughton as the 2nd Lord Fairhaven in 1966. He was born in the United States and educated at Harrow, before joining the Royal Horse Guards in 1920. Their father, English emigré Urban Broughton (1857-1929), had a successful career building sewerage systems in the USA in the 1890s and married Carla Leland Rogers (1867-1939). She was the daughter of the wealthy oil and railroad tycoon Henry Huttlestone Rogers (184-1909). In 1912 the family moved to London. The title Lord Fairhaven was awarded to Urban for his political activities, but he died before he could use it and his eldest son Huttlestone became the first Baron Fairhaven.Both brothers were great collectors and Henry put together one of the largest twentieth-century collections of depictions of natural history. He left a large bequest of one hundred and twenty flower paintings, over nine hundred watercolours and drawings and forty-four volumes of drawings by botanical artists such as Redouté and Ehret to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (the Broughton Bequest). The brothers’ home, Angelsey Abbey near Cambridge, with its large natural history collection, was left to the National Trust in 1966.

Black and red chalk on laid paperOval 15.3 x 11.5 cm.; 6 1/8 x 4 ½ inchesProvenanceBonhams, 19 February 2008, lot 144;Cyril Fry;Private collection U.K. until 2020The artist was the eldest daughter of John Carwardine of Thinghills Court, Withington, Herefordshire, and his wife Anne Bullock, a miniature painter. She also practised miniature painting, regarded as a genteel pastime for a woman. It seems that Penelope took up painting as a means of earning a living after her father ran into financial difficulties from around 1754. Cawardine exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1771 and 1772.Cawardine painted many fashionable sitters including Lady Anne Egerton, the Earl of Coventry, Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry (Wallace Collection) and Alice, the Countess of Egremont (Kenwood). James Boswell the diarist visited her home on March 15, 1763 to call on Lord Eglington who was having a miniature done, and described her in his London Journal as a ‘a very good-looking, agreeable woman’.She moved in artistic circles and was painted by George Romney, John Downman and Thomas Bardwell. She is said to have been a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his sister Frances, and apparently Reynolds painted a portrait of one of her sisters as a present for her. (The only record of this is in Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin’s A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A., 1899, where a brief entry for Miss Cawardine states ‘Sat in 1777’).Her brother Rev. Thomas Carwardine (1734-1824), was rector and clerk of Earl's Colne Priory, Essex and a close friend of Romney, who was godfather to his daughter Anne (b.1779) and a frequent visitor to their house. Romney painted his portrait in 1772.Penelope Cawardine married James Butler, organist of Ranelagh and St. Margaret's, and St. Anne's, Westminster in 1763 at St James’s, Piccadilly. After her marriage she worked much less, as the social customs of the day dictated.The National Museum of Sweden owns the only other recorded drawing by Cawardine, drawn in a very similar style to the present work. It shares the characteristic diagonal hatching of the red chalk, is on similar laid paper and is cut into a rough oval in the same way.Examples of her miniatures can be found in the Wallace Collection, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Kenwood House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Tormey-Holder Collection.Cyril Fry (1918 -2010) was a dealer in British drawings who owned a gallery in Jermyn Street. Fry and his wife Shirley amassed a substantial private collection over the course of his career.

Signed l.l.: Edith Martineau., watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching out and gum arabic29 x 23.5 cm; 11 3/8 x 9 ¼ inchesThis is a view of Hampstead Heath looking towards Harrow on the Hill.Edith Martineau, together with her sister Gertrude, was one of a small group of female artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.The daughter of Dr James Martineau, a Unitarian minister and theologian, the artist was born in Liverpool. After studying at the Liverpool School of Art and Leigh's Academy, she became one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1862, regularly exhibiting there and at the Royal Watercolour Society (where she was elected an associate member in 1862), the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Water-colour Society. Her work was also exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She died in Hampstead.Martineau worked in watercolour primarily and is known for her delicately painted and meticulous landscapes which owe much to the Pre-Raphaelites, and genre paintings. Examples of her work can be found in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and other institutions.