Mary Perrin (Irish fl.) The Watcher

Signed twice l.r.: Mary and M.Perrin, watercolour over traces of pencil with bodycolour and gum arabic, inscribed verso: The Flamingo Fan/by/Miss Mary Perrin,/Fortfield House/Terenure/Co Dublin/From Professor McHardy F.R.C.S./March 1911/Exhibition picture Royal Academy, further inscribed on fragments of original label attached to backboard: Miss Mary P….n/Fortfield House/Terenure Co. Dublin/No:2/The Flamingo Fan/…Dubli/…House/…/ure/DublinCircular, 21 cm diam.; 8 ¼ inches, on artist’s board measuring 22.5 x 22 cm.; 8 ¾ x 8 5/8 inchesFrame size 35.5 x 35.5 cm.; 14 x 14 inchesExhibitedRoyal Academy, London, 1905, no. 929Mary Perrin specialised in intense watercolour portraits of female subjects, often drawing them with elaborate hats or coiffures. She also painted landscapes.Her work is recorded frequently in Irish exhibitions. Perrin exhibited at the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) which was founded in 1870 as the Amateur Drawing Society by an informal group of six well-connected women from Co. Waterford, Baroness Pauline Prochazca, Miss Harriet Keane, Miss Frances Keane, Miss Henrietta Phipps, Miss Fanny Currey and Miss Fanny Musgrave. Eight years after its founding, the organisation briefly became the "Irish Fine Art Society" before settling to its current name in 1888. It held (and still holds) an Annual Exhibition of the work of its members.Perrin started to exhibit at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour in London in 1896 at their galleries at 195 Piccadilly. Perrin also showed regularly at the Royal Academy, the Society of Women Artists and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.Perrin’s work was frequently praised by contemporary critics who remarked on the ‘richness and power’ of her watercolour (Freeman’s Journal, 8 March 1886, in a review of The Irish Fine Art Society exhibition) and she won many prizes at various Irish societies.The backboard labels on this work records her Irish address Fortfield House, Terenure, Co. Dublin. Another work by her has a partial address in London, …s (Hans?) Crescent, London SW., suggesting that she moved between the two cities.Perrin took an active part in the social life of Dublin and is often mentioned in contemporary newspapers as attending charitable and major social events such as the Viceregal Drawing Room in Belfast and costume balls.The artist’s family home, Fortfield House in Dublin, was bought by the Rt. Hon. John Hatchell (1788-1870) in 1858. He was an Irish lawyer and politician and his daughter Penelope married John Perrin. The house remained in the Perrin-Hatchell family until the death of Mary Perrin in 1929. In her will she left her estate to George Hatchell of Tanganyika. The house was demolished in 1834.This work may have belonged to Professor Malcolm McHardy, FRCSE (d.1912) who was Professor of Ophthalmology at King’s College and Ophthalmic Surgeon to King’s College Hospital. He published extensively on ophthalmic surgery.

Signed with initials l.r.: HBB, watercolour and bodycolour over pencil, inscribed verso: Siracuse and stamped with collector’s markProvenanceGilbert Davis (L. 757a.);Edward Seago, his estate sale at Christie’s, London 1 March 1977, lot 94;Where bought by B.M. Williams;Christie’s, London, 21 November 2007, lot 145, where acquired by the previous owner until 2025 Gilbert Davis (1899–1983) built up a large collection of watercolours in the middle of the twentieth century. He sold the bulk of his collection in 1959 to the Huntingdon Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. Edward Seago RBA, RWS (1910-1974) was one of the most popular British artists of 20th century, who painted in oils and watercolours.

One hundred and forty-four drawings on sixty-eight pages, laid into an album bound in vellum, the fly leaf with a large label inscribed: Miss Stones/First Efforts/plates.71The drawings are of various sizes, on laid paper, each page 31.5 x 19.7 cm.; 12 1⁄4 x 7 3⁄4 inchesProvenancePrivate collection, U.K.;Private sale by Sotheby’s Australia, January 25 2001; Patrick Dockar-Drysdale (1929-2020)ExhibitedTate Britain, 'Now you See Us- Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920', May - October 2024, ill. p.42, p. 205Sarah Stone was the daughter of James Stone, a fan painter and is thought to have assisted her father. The family lived in London.The dated drawings in this album suggest that Stone executed many of them when she was ten or eleven years old and identify her as something of a child prodigy. This album contains many copies from drawing books which were a popular means of allowing an artist to develop their technique by copying. The number of drawings and the repetition of certain subjects reflect a systematic approach and a determination to improve and there are drawings after Holbein, Ribera and Boucher, the minor details may be after Le Brun.One of the drawings is inscribed ‘The New Drawing Book‘ which could be a reference to Francis Vivares, A New Drawing Book, in the Manner of Chalk fit for Youth to Draw after. 6 sepia soft ground etchings, by W. Hebert after Vanloo and Boucher, 4to. Frans. Vivares. Sept. 1759. The plates in this were in the manner of red chalk.The range of subjects in the present album suggests Stone was using one of the compilation drawing books, such as Carrington Bowles, The School of Art; or, most compleat Drawing-Book extant: consisting of an extensive series of well chosen examples, selected from the designs of those eminent masters, Watteau, Boucher, Bouchardson, Le Brun, Eisen, &c. engraved on sixty copper plates, and performed in a method which expresses the manner of handling the chalk, 1765 and later editions.

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.

Head and shoulders, pen and brown ink and wash22.9 x 17.3 cm; 9 x 10 3/4 inchesProvenance: Private collection, UK, bought at a charity auction at the Finchingfield GuildhallLandseer’s caricatures are a less well-known aspect of his art. They were made for private circulation and show Landseer’s effortless ability to capture the physical oddities of his subjects in an acute yet affectionate fashion. This drawing was once thought to depict Paganini but the subject is currently unidentified.

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.

KT633Fragments of a colossal statue at the Memnonium, Thebes Signed l.l.: 'David Roberts. R.A.' and inscribed and dated 'Memnonium, Thebes Dec. 5th, 1838', further inscribed l.r.: 'Dimensions of the statue/Between the shoulders [?] 26 feet/Circumference of the Head 54"/Shoulder to the elbow 13" [5]', watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour on blue-grey paper 32.7 x 48.9 cm; 12 7/8 x 19 ¼ inchesPROVENANCEPossibly David Roberts; Christie's, London, 13-20 May, 1865, lot 67 as 'Thebes: Fragments of the Colossus of Rameses'; Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 15 March 1990, lot 42; with Spink, London, 1990; Christie's, London, 16 November 2006, lot 128This temple on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor, was visited twice by Roberts during his voyage on the Nile in 1838. On the outward journey, on the way to Abu Simbel, he had visited all the temples on both sides of the Nile at Luxor, and on 21 October hired donkeys to visit the ruins at Gurnah on the west bank, noting in his journal: 'The head and shoulders of the Memnon lying on the ground is enormous one can only wonder how it got there - the trouble of dislodging it must have been almost equal to the erection ...'.The present drawing was executed on the return journey when he was on the west bank of the river at Luxor from 3 to 5 December 1838. Roberts noted in his Journal 'I have been very industrious today, thanks to a Thunder Storm, a most uncommon thing in this part of the world - The sun was quite obscured and the peals of thunder were very loud accompanied with rain.... Made four large coloured sketches two of the Memnonium and two of Medinet Habou.' (Eastern Journal, National Library of Scotland).The present drawing was executed on the spot, although it is possible that the colouring was completed later during the trip. This drawing was used as the basis for the drawing which was eventually lithographed.This temple was called the Memnonium or the Tomb of Osymandyas, one of the names of Rameses II, the king to whom it was dedicated. It is now more commonly known as the Ramesseum and is the temple from which another colossal head was taken to the British Museum, where it inspired Shelley's famous sonnet Ozymandias.

Watercolour and bodycolour, signed and inscribed verso: Castle of Kilchurn on Lough Awe/Western Highlands of Scotland/T. Walmsley and inscribed in another contemporary hand: J. Kemble, unframed37.1 x 50.4 cm; 141⁄2 x 19 3⁄4 inchesProvenanceThe Leger Galleries Ltd., London, 1965;Private collection, U.K. until 2020Walmsley was born in Dublin into a military background. After a quarrel with his family, he moved to London and worked as a scene painter at the Royal Opera House. In 1788, he returned to Ireland for two years to work at the Crow Street Theatre. The inscription ‘J. Kemble’ may be a reference to the actor John Philip Kemble (1757-1832).Walmsley regularly exhibited landscapes at the R.A., including many of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Wight. Much of his work was aquatinted and published. At the end of his life he retired to Bath. Examples of his drawings may be found in the British Museum, the V&A, the Ashmolean in Oxford and many 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.

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.