F. M. Female Hottentot

Slave Girl of the CapeSigned with initials on border l.r.: F .Y. (?) M, and inscribed l.c.: Slave Girl of the Cape, watercolour on wove paper, with a laid paper border watermarked 1801Drawing size 20.3 x 14.6 cm.; 8 1/8 x 5 ¾ inches, with border 25.8 x 20.2 cm.; 10 1/8 x 8 inchesThis drawing came from a now disbound English album which contained works on paper from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.Slavery in South African began around 1650 when the Cape colony was controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) when Cape Town was founded as a supply port for their shipping. The trade continued until the eventual abolition of slavery in the Colony, by then under British rule, in 1834. The British had banned trading in slaves between her colonies in 1807 but the final emancipation was delayed until 1834.

Daniel Maclise , R.A. (1806-1870)A seated girl reading in a doorwayPencil13.5 x 8 cm.; 5 ¼ x 3 1/8 inchesProvenanceCovent Garden Gallery Ltd.Daniel Maclise was born in Cork to a family of Scottish descent. After a brief period working in a bank, Maclise’s passion for drawing led him to pursue a career in art which he studied at the Cork Society of Arts.He moved to London in 1826 to attend the Royal Academy where he excelled as a student, particularly in life drawing and history painting. He began exhibiting in the RA in 1829, was made an associate in 1830, and an academician in 1840.

Signed with initials l.r., pen and brown ink14.5 x 12 cm.; 5 ½ x 4 ¾ inchesProvenance:Mrs F.L. Evans;With Colnaghi, 1951, catalogue no. 59Duncan Beresford-Jones until 2000The Shah of Persia presented a group of Arabian horses to the Prince Regent, commemorated in a painting of 1819 by H.B. Chalon (Tate Britain, TO2357). Landseer was also attracted to the subject and two versions of oils of an Arabian stallion with an Attendant in Persian dress are known, see Richard Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer, 1982, p. 54.The Shah sent an Ambassador, Mirza Abdul Hassan Shiraz, to London in 1819 to discuss with Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, aspects of the Anglo-Persian treaty concluded by Sir Gore Ouseley in Tehran in 1812, and more recently revised. That treaty had established an Anglo-Persian alliance against a possible Franco-Russian one and the Shah was hoping for positive assurances that England would protect Persia in the event of a Russian invasion.The Ambassador left Tehran in October 1818 laden with presents from the Shah, including eighteen selected Arabian horses for the Prince Regent. The horses travelled with the Ambassador to Constantinople and then the British government organised their transport to London, an expensive undertaking arranged by a Mr George Willcox and costing over £1500. The presentation of the Shah’s gifts was listed in The Times of 24 May and took place at Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence. There are seven horses pictured in Chalon’s painting, and it is not known how many of them survived the journey, but the present drawing presumably shows one of them.Mirza Abdu Hassan Shiraz’s visit aroused considerable social and popular attention but the visit was not a success, as following the defeat of Napoleon and the conclusion of an alliance with Russia the British no longer attached much importance to their Persian alliance.

Pen and grey ink and grey wash over pencil24.5 x 17.1 cm.; 10 x 6 ¾ inchesProvenanceWith the Squire Gallery;J. Thursby-Pelham;Mrs Guy Argles and by descent until 1995, anon. sale Christie’s, London, 7 November 1995, lot 71;Spink, London;Christie’s, London, 21 November 2002, lot 8, where bought by the previous owner;Dreweatt’s, Château de Lasfonds sale, 16 November 2022, lot 143ExhibitedSpink, London, ‘Annual Exhibition of Watercolours and Drawings, 28 May – 21 June 1996, no. 4This imposing drawing shows Satan holding his shield aloft to defend himself against Heaven. Romney made many illustrations to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ around 1794. This drawing appears to show a moment in Book 1 when Satan and the other rebels are ‘Hurled headlong, flaming from the ethereal sky’. Elsewhere in the poem Milton compares Satan’s shield to a moon seen through Galileo’s telescope.Another similar drawing in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum also shows Satan holding his shield above his headhttps://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/16046It is possible that the French Revolution, raging at this time, was close to Romney’s mind when he worked on these drawings for 'Paradise Lost', giving them some contemporary political significance.

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 1027.2 x 21.4 cm; 10 3⁄4 x 8 1⁄2 inchesProvenanceJohn 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 2019Von 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.

Pencil and black and red chalk, in original frame42 x 34.5 cm.; 16 ½ x 13 5/8 inchesProvenance: With Dorothy Roberts, Lincoln, 1996;Acquired by the previous owner in May 1996 from Douglas Turner;Private collection U.K. until 2021Literature: Kenneth Garlick, ‘A Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence’ in The Walpole Society; 1962–64, xxxix, 1964, p. 244This unpublished drawing by Lawrence is an addition to a group of three known portraits of Munia.Lawrence became friendly with the Angerstein family in about 1790, when John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823) took charge of his financial affairs. Lawrence did paintings and drawings of most of the family, which included John Julius’ son, John Angerstein, M.P. (1772/3–1858), who married, in 1799, Amelia Lock, daughter of William Lock, who was also a friend and patron of Lawrence. Isabel Smith, or Munia, was nurse to the couple’s five children at Woodlands, the family residence which John Julius had built at Blackheath in 1770s. She was described as Russian in the papers of Miss May Rowley, a direct descendant of Elizabeth Julia Angerstein, daughter of John Julius. (Archive reference number NG14/230/1).This smaller version of this composition (measuring 35.5 x 30.25 cm; 14 x 11 15/16 inches) from May Rowley is now in the collection of Tate (T00768). The Tate drawing is inscribed on the back ‘This is a drawing of my Nurse Isabel Smith, called Munia, buried at Nh Willingham Lincolne. Wm Angerstein, drawn by Sr Thos Lawrence at Woodlands’. The Tate drawing originally belonged to Elizabeth, John Angerstein’s daughter, and was bequeathed to the nation in 1965 by May Rowley, who had inherited it from her grandfather Richard Freeman Rowley, Elizabeth’s husband.A second version, the same larger size as the present drawing, is in the possession of Viscount Daventry at Arbury, and was exhibited at Bristol City Art Gallery, ‘Exhibition of works by Sir Thomas Lawrence P.R.A.’, 1951, no. 48.Garlick records a further smaller version of this subject measuring 35.6 x 30.2 cm as being in the possession of Miss Keightley in 1925. She inherited the drawing from her father Archibald Keightley who was Lawrence’s executor. This drawing, in poor condition, is now in the Royal Academy (LAW/3/1). This work was illustrated in R.Brimley Johnson, Mrs Delaney, 1925, rep. facing p. 256 (incorrectly called Mrs Delaney).The financier and philanthropist John Julius Angerstein was born in St Petersburg in 1735 to a German family who had settled in Russia. He emigrated to England in about 1749 and built a fortune, partly from a career in the City of London, developing Lloyd’s insurance business. An active philanthropist, he was a patron of Lawrence’s and the artist advised him on his picture acquisitions together with Benjamin West. Angerstein started collecting around 1790.On Angerstein’s death the British Government purchased thirty-eight of his pictures and took over the lease of his Pall Mall town house. The public was able to view the collection here before the National Gallery, founded in 1824, was constructed in Trafalgar Square and it formed the nucleus of the gallery’s collection. Four paintings from the Pall Mall house were not purchased, a Reynolds portrait of Angerstein’s first wife and their first child, and three Fuseli paintings after Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’which were returned to Angerstein’s heirs, and which remained at Woodlands until 1870.For further information about Woodlands and the collection kept there see Susanna Avery-Quash, ‘The lover of the fine arts is well amused with the choice pictures that adorn the house’: John Julius Angerstein’s ‘other’ art collection at his suburban villa, Woodlandshttps://academic.oup.com/jhc/article/33/3/fhx055/4773890 (Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 33, Issue 3, November 2021, fhx055, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhx055See also Anthony Twist, A Life of John Julius Angerstein, 1735–1823: Widening circles of finance, philanthropy, and the arts in eighteenth-century London (London, 2006).

Inscribed with artist’s shorthand and dated 35 c.r., pencil7.2 x 15.1 cm.; 2 ¾ x 5 7/8 inchesProvenanceThe Manning Galleries Ltd., January 1972;Private collection until 2023

Pencil26.5 x 18 cm.; 10 1⁄2 x 7 1/8 inchesProvenanceEstate of the artist (his daughter Henrietta Phipps), until 2000;Davis & Langdale Company, New York, 2000;Private collection, from 2000 until 2023Exhibited:Davis & Langdale Company, New York, 2000, Henry Lamb: Works on Paper, no. 13 [checklist]This compelling drawing was executed around 1930.Henry Lamb was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1883, shortly before his father moved the family to Manchester, where he spent his childhood. He studied medicine before abandoning this path to be an artist. At twenty-two he left for London to study under Augustus John and William Orpen at their Chelsea Art School.John was a particularly formative influence and Lamb moved to Paris with him a few years later. Lamb spent a couple of summers on the south coast of Brittany, in search of a more traditional way of life. This impulse drew Lamb to Gola Island in Northern Ireland two years later.In London in 1905, Lamb joined the Fitzroy Street Group and was a founding member of both the Camden Town Group and the London Group. He married Nina Forrest, or Euphemia, in 1906 but the marriage proved short-lived. He was friendly with the Bloomsbury Group, having known Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell from his early days in London, but he often had little patience with them. He was close friends with the eminent critic and biographer Lytton Strachey and between 1912 and 1914 he painted his portrait, now held in the Tate and one of his greatest works.In the First World War, Lamb served as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France, Salonika and Palestine; he was awarded the Military Cross. He was not an official war artist but drew extensively and the resulting oils are an important part of his oeuvre.In 1928 he married Lady Pansy Pakenham and moved to Coombe Bissett in Wiltshire. Lamb was appointed an official war artist for the Second World War, making portraits of soldiers and studies of servicemen at work across the South of England. Lamb was elected as an associate of the Royal Academy and a Trustee of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate at this time. He was finally awarded full membership of the Royal Academy in 1949.Interest in Lamb’s work has revived in recent years, and he has been the subject of recent exhibitions at Salisbury Museum and Poole Museum. His work can be found in many collections around the world, including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the Government Art Collection and the National Gallery of Canada.

Signed l.l.: W Muller/1839., oil on panel43.5 x 27 cm.; 17 x 10 5/8 inchesProvenanceThomas Agnew & Sons, London;Anonymous sale Sotheby’s, London, 10 November 1982, lot 49;Noortman & Brod, New York, 1983;Anonymous sale, Christie’s, New York, 10 February 1998 lot 160;Matthew Rutenberg, New York, until 2020ExhibitedNoortman & Brod, 18th and 19th Century Paintings, April – May 1983, New York, June - July 1983, LondonThis spirited painting executed with great bravura was done shortly after the artist’s return from Egypt in 1839. Müller arrived in Egypt by steamer in November 1838. He was one of the first established European artists to visit Egypt and was there at the same time as David Roberts, although neither knew of the other’s presence there.Müller was exhilarated by his arrival in the bustling metropolis of Cairo and was particularly intrigued by the slave market, which he described as ‘one of my most favourite haunts’ (W. J. Müller, ‘An Artist’s Tour of Egypt’, Art-Union 1, London, 1839, pp. 131-2).Müller is the best-known artist of the Bristol School. His German father settled in the city and was the first curator of the Bristol Institution, the forerunner of the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. His early exposure to art led to a short apprenticeship with James Baker Pyne and a friendship with the Reverend James Bulwer (1749-1879), a pupil of John Sell Cotman, whose collection of Norwich School drawings Müller would have known.In 1833 Müller was one of the founders of the Bristol Sketching Club and his travels began the following year with visits to Holland, Germany and Venice. His 1838 trip started in Athens before he continued to Cairo. In 1840 he visited France and in 1843 he went to Lycia at the same time as Sir Charles Fellows’ expedition, during which he produced some of his finest watercolours. He died at the age of 43 after his return from Turkey.Following Müller’s death, prices of his oil paintings rose dramatically in the salerooms. Articles on his work appeared regularly and in 1875 N. Neal Solly, the biographer of David Cox, wrote a long biography. In 1896 the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery held a retrospective of 192 of Müller’s paintings, watercolour and drawings. His reputation was kept alive in Bristol where the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1962 was celebrated with an exhibition at Bristol Art Gallery, while in 1984 Tate Gallery held a show of his French and Lycian watercolours. In 1991 a major retrospective was held at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, who hold the most comprehensive collection of his work, organised by Francis Greenacre, the renowed authority on Müller and the Bristol School.

Pencil on laid paper, partially watermarked and countermarked 181914.5 x 10.9 cm.; 5 ¾ x 4 ¼ inchesProvenance: Cyril and Shirley Fry until 2021Literature: J. Witt, 'William Henry Hunt (1790-1864)', 1982, no. 369Exhibited: 'Hunt Exhibition Fry Collection', 1967, no. 17 (2)This work dates from c. 1820.