Joseph Murray Ince Clovelly, Devon

Signed, inscribed and dated l.r.: Hindoo Temple near Dehra/Himmalayas in the background-/Oct. 1869./C.F.G.C., watercolour over pencil with touches of white.Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand, is in the foothills of the Himalayas. On the banks of a river is a Hindu temple in front of which figures ride elephants through the shallow waters. On the riverbank, a woman performs the aarti, releasing a diya to float upon the waters as an offering.For further work by this artist please see the catalogue link and enquire about availability

Signed l.l.: John, pencil and black chalk45.5 x 30.5 cm.; 17 7/8 x 12 inchesProvenanceLady Hornby (1934-2021)ExhibitedAugustus John, Olympia, 23-28 February 1999, no. 61 (no catalogue)This freely drawn, captivating drawing dates from c. 1904-1906. It epitomises the qualities of John’s fluent draughtsmanship and his ability to capture the essence of a sitter with apparent ease. Its immediacy, sureness and simplicity place it amongst his finest female portraits.Sheran Cazalet was the daughter of Peter Cazalet, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother’s, racing trainer. Her grandparents, William and Maud Cazalet, were friends of Augustus John. She married Sir Simon Hornby in 1968. He was the last family member to serve as chairman of WH Smith and served as chairman of the Design Council; he died in 2010. The couple lived at The Ham, Oxfordshire, where they assembled a collection of twentieth century works on paper, created a beautiful garden and entertained in style. Many of the contents of The Ham were sold at Christie’s, London, in 2012.

Signed and dated l.r.: W. Callow.1833, watercolour over traces of pencil with scratching outProvenancePrivate collection U.K. until 2026This fine example of Callow’s work dates from the time he was sharing a studio in Paris with Thomas Shotter Boys at 19 Rue de Bouloi near the Louvre. He visited England during the summer and presumably travelled through Dover.

Signed and dated lower left: J. Severn Roma 1825Oil on canvas61.6 by 75cm., 24 1/4 by 39 1/2 inches, framed size 82 x 90 cm.; 32 1/4 x 35 3/8 inches£22,000This unpublished painting depicts the wife and child of a brigand apparently hiding from the authorities, probably in the Alban Hills. The sleeping man, his rifle at his side, is watched over by his wife who rocks their child in a makeshift cradle covered by a cloth and hanging from a tree branch. Banditti were a popular artistic subject, made fashionable by the work of Salvator Rosa, and Severn experienced an attempted robbery first hand in 1823 when he was travelling around Naples, where brigands were common. Here he focusses on the humanity of the mother and draws attention to the precarious condition of the family.Joseph Severn was the eldest son of a music teacher from Hoxton. At the age of 14 he became apprenticed to the engraver William Bond before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1815. Here, in 1820, he was awarded the gold medal for historical painting for his Una and the Red Cross Knight in the Cave of Despair, which granted him a travelling scholarship. This coincided with the illness of his friend, the poet John Keats, and together they travelled to Rome in search of a better climate for the ailing poet. During the winter of 1820-21 Severn nursed Keats in their apartment near the Spanish Steps, his detailed letters from the period of great importance, but, on 23 February 1821, Keats died.Severn remained in Rome, launching his own artistic career as a painter of landscapes, portraits and subject paintings. His pictures of Italian peasant life won him such an avid following that there were times during the 1820s when he could not keep up with the flood of commissions. At the beginning of 1827 he wrote to his younger brother Charles that he had “now 9 pictures on order”, and by the beginning of the following year he had “eleven pictures on hand” and this popularity continued well into the 1830s. Patrons, friends, family and fellow artists all praised the freshness and originality of his Italian painting. Sir Charles Eastlake wrote of the “richness of colour” and the "truth of circumstance, situation, incident & costume," of Severn’s Italian work (Charles Eastlake to Severn, 7 May 1834 and May 1832 (MS: Harvard, bMS Eng 1434 [52, 51], quoted in Grant F. Scott, Joseph Severn Letters and Memoirs, 2005, p. 23). It seems probable that the present work was a commission.Severn exhibited extensively at the Royal Academy during the late 1820s and 1830s showing eleven paintings of which ten were Italian genre pictures. Today comparable paintings from this period can be found in the Thorvaldens Museum in Denmark, Italian woman and her Daughter, 1831 and Italian Peasant in The Royal Collection, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The Fountain of 1828 has a similar landscape background to the present work and hangs in the Royal Palace, Brussels. The Vintage, was commissioned by the Duke of Bedford in 1825 for Woburn Abbey. Further work is in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum.Severn played a crucial role in the foundation of the British Academy of the Fine Arts at Rome (1823-1936), securing funding from various influential patrons including William Hamilton, the antiquarian, and hosting evening gatherings in his apartment on the Via di San Isodoro, where artists met to study and draw from life, and where they had access to casts, painting and sculpting material and books. It was also a temporary rooming house where artists who had recently arrived from England could stay while looking for a studio (see, Grant F. Scott, op. cit., p.17).Severn remained in Rome for most of his life other than a spell in England from 1841-1861. With the help of William Gladstone, an avid patron, he became British Consul in Rome from 1860-72. He died in Rome in 1879 and, at his request, was buried next to Keats in the Protestant cemetery near Porta San Paolo and adjacent to the Pyramid of Cestius. Their graves are pictured below.

Two, each signed l.l.and l.r., each inscribed l.c.: F. Concolr./life and F. Ocelot.of.Albany./Life, watercolour over pencilEach approx. 25 x 17.5 cm.; 9 ¾ x 6 7/8 inchesThe artist was self-taught and specialised in drawings of animals and field sports.From a wealthy Quaker family, Howitt took up art professionally when he encountered financial difficulties and became a drawing master in Ealing.He married Thomas Rowlandson's sister Elizabeth in 1779 and was part of Rowlandson's circle together with George Morland, Henry Wigstead and J.R. Smith.

Two, bodycolour, one on paper watermarked: SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815Each 20.5 x 33.5 cmProvenance: Mrs BaldockThe artists of the Patna School specialised in the depiction of everyday activities for their British patrons. Traditionally described as the work of the Company School (reflecting the patronage of the East India Company employees) this unique genre evolved as the painting styles of Western and Mughal traditions merged.

KT379Signed and dated l.l.: John Dearman 1845, signed and inscribed on stretcher: Cattle crossing Merrow Down Guilford Surrey/storm passing off.Jn. Dearman 184., oil on paper laid down on canvas stamped PREPARED BY/CHARLES ROBERSON/LONG ACRE LONDON18 x 15.4 cm.; 7 x 6 1/8 inchesFrame size 28 x 26 cm.; 11 x 10 inchesProvenanceChristie’s, London (1002V);John Abbott (1937-2011)This delightful oil sketch captures a huge brooding sky with distant light breaking through which suggests that the storm is passing. The grandeur of nature is enhanced by the small figure of a shepherd with a flash of red at his neck, with his dog and flock of sheep, which draw the eye to the foreground. Virtuoso handling of the impasto of the landscape in the middle distance show the work of an artist spontaneously enjoying his paint. Dearman also records the weather effects on the stretcher in his neat hand.The artist lived in Camberwell, London in the 1830s and had a house in Guilford High Street. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1824-1856 and also showed often at the Royal Society of British Artists and the British Institution.

KT636Watercolour over traces of pencil with touches of gum arabic and scratching out21 x 29 cm.; 8 ¼ x 11 3/8 inchesProvenanceAgnew’s, (1891);Private collection, Herefordshire until 2024Samuel 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.

KT453BInscribed and dated in pencil verso: Tring Hill/ 1791, oil on paper12.8 x 19 cm.; 5 1/16 x 7 ½ inchesFrame size 29 x 34 cm.; 11 1/4 x 13 ¼ 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 421This spontaneous oil sketch originally came from an album of oil sketches from nature, executed in 1790s and assembled by the artist for his own pleasure, inscribed ‘Studies from nature by G. Garrard’. Five further examples of his oil sketches of locations in and around London are in the collection of Tate Gallery.

Henry Pilleau (1813-1899)The Dead SeaSigned with monogram l.l., watercolour 21 x 38 cm.; 8 ¼ x 15 inchesProvenancePresented to Queen Victoria in 1887 for her Golden Jubilee by the Royal Society of Water-Colour PaintersPilleau served with 16th Lancers. He is best known for his colourful watercolours and prints of Egypt. He visited Egypt in 1840s with Lieutenant -Colonel Sir George Everest (1790-1866), Surveyor-General of India, presumably on the men’s way to India. Pilleau’s ‘Sketches in Egypt’ comprising 12 lithographs was published in London in 1845 by Dickinson and dedicated to Everest. It comprises text and colourful plates of famous views and sites. Everest, a Welsh surveyor and geographer, after whom Mount Everest was named, served as the Surveyor General of India (1830–1843) and worked on the Great Trigonometric Survey of India.This watercolour left the Royal collection in the early twentieth century together with a substantial number of other works on paper, and there is no documentation for this with the Royal Collection. The other works whose details are recorded on the sheet of Windsor notepaper attached to the backboard were also dispersed at this time ( from the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art gift, Llyn Crafnant by D.W. Barker (the rendering of his name as ‘Banken’ suggests that someone was inaccurately copying from another source); Time-Honoured Lancaster by R. Aspinwall; and A Breezy Day by R. Short).