Evelyn Dunbar Shall we gather by the river

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.

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 and dated l.r.: E. Sumner/1899, black chalk25 x 17.5 cm.; 9 7/8 x 6 7/8 inchesProvenancePrivate collection U.K. until 2023The artist of the work was known as Lily, the oldest daughter of the Rev. John Henry Robertson Sumner and his second wife Elizabeth Anne(née Gibson). The family lived at Kelbarrow near Grasmere in the Lake District.A collection of papers relating to the Sumner family are in the possession of the Cumbria Archive Centre. It includes numerous sketchbooksby several members of the Sumner family including several of the Lake District and also of European subjects.Her sister Maggie Sumner (1859–1919) was a correspondence pupil of John Ruskin and his letters contained detailed instructions aimed at improving her drawing. She was the only female artist to contribute to the first five issues of The Yellow Book, the fashionable magazine edited by Aubrey Beardsley. Her work was very detailed and meticulous in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. One of her sketchbooks, depicting landscapes surrounded by floral borders, has an inscription gifting it to her sister Lily for Christmas 1875 and is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (Karen Taylor, British Women Artists 1780- 1890, 2020, no. 18).

Watercolour18 x 9 cm.; 7 1/8 x 3 5/8 inchesProvenanceThe Leger Galleries Ltd, ‘An Exhibition of Watercolours by Helen Allingham, R.W.S. 1848-1926’, November – December 1972, no. 153, where purchased by Sir Owen Aisher (1900-1993); The Marley Tile Co. Ltd; The Muro Collection, until 2021Sir Owen Aisher was a prominent collector of the work of Helen Allingham who owned a large number of her works. He was the chairman of the Marley Tile company, which specialised in roofing tiles, and he collected works which depicted the building materials it made. This became known as the Marley collection and was sold at Christie’s in 1991. This work was part of his personal collection.

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.

Signed l.r. Marian/M. Chase 1874, watercolour over traces of pencil with touches of white and gum arabic, in a period sand frame20 x 29.2 cm.; 8 1/8 x 11 1⁄2 inchesChase specialised in depicting flowers, fruit and still lifes, her work characterised by delicacy and careful observation. Ellen Claxton, in her seminal work English Female Artists, London, 1876, Vol. 2, p. 184, described Chase as ‘having an intense love of the country and of wild flowers...her chief pictures have been the simple growing flowers of woods and lanes’.The artist was born in London, the daughter of John Chase, an artist, and his second wife, Georgiana. John Chase had been partly trained by John Constable and his first wife, Mary Ann Rix (d. 1840), had also been a watercolour artist. Chase was taught perspective and watercolour painting by her father and life drawing by Margaret Gillies (1803-1907), who was not only an artist but also a pioneer of women’s liberation, and amongst the earliest supporters of the suffrage movement.She exhibited from 1866 to 1905 at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute, the Dudley Gallery, the Grosvenor Gallery, the International Exhibition of 1871 and various provincial, colonial, and foreign exhibitions. On 22 March 1875, she was elected an associate of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and in 1879 she became a full member. In 1878 she contributed drawings and watercolours to the journal The Garden. In 1888 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded her a silver medal.Chase died in 1905 after a heart operation and is buried in St Pancras Cemetery.Examples of her work can be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum and in the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery.

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 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.

Signed l.r.: Louisa Seyffarth, watercolour heightened with white and gum arabic and stopping out24.3 x 33.5 cm.; 9 ¾ x 13 ¼ inchesProvenanceThomas Baring (40 Charles Street, Berkely [sic] Square, London)ExhibitedThe Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1841, no. 266 (12 guineas)Louisa Sharpe, the daughter of William Sharpe, an engraver, was the most talented of four sisters, Eliza, Charlotte and Mary Ann, all of whom became artists. Raised in Birmingham, the sisters were encouraged to travel to France and Germany to visit galleries and were taught engraving. In 1816 the family moved to London.Ellen Clayton, the Victorian chronicler of female artists, mentions the present work by name and records its date as 1841 (see E. Clayton, English Female Artists, 1876, Vol. 1 pp. 379-80.)The artist exhibited over thirty miniature portraits at the Royal Academy from 1817. Louisa developed her practise as a watercolourist and made highly finished costume subjects and domestic scenes such as the present work. Many of her drawings were engraved in popular annuals such as The Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not Annual and Heath’s Book of Beauty. Her work was engraved by Charles Heath, John Henry Robinson and Francis Engleheart. In 1829 she was elected as a member of the Old Water-Colour Society, where she was to exhibit thirty-eight works.Roget notes that her choice of subjects show a ‘taste for dramatic point, and a search for anecdote of a telling kind as well as a picturesque capacity’, extremely long titles and not a little humour (J.L. Roget, History of the Old Water-Colour Society, vol. II, reprint 1972, pp. 42-3).In 1834 Louisa Sharpe married Professor Woldemar Seyffarth and moved to Dresden. The couple had two daughters, one of whom, Agnes, also became an artist. Her work continued to be exhibited in London until her death. Her husband was the King of Saxony’s Commissioner to the Great Exhibition in 1851.Ellen Clayton describes the Sharpe sisters as ‘among the most remarkable figure painters’ and notes that the Duke of York, George III’s second son, was their first patron. She states that they were ‘among the first to originate the modern bold style of water-colour drawing’ (ibid Vol. 1 pp. 379-80).Anna Bronwell Jameson (1794-1860) the British writer, art historian and feminist who visited Dresden in 1830s wrote of Sharpe’s work in the same breath as that of Elizabeth Sirani and Angelica Kauffman and remarked that it was supremely feminine (see Sketches of Art, Literature and Character, Harper and Brothers, 1834, p. 221).Thomas Baring (1799-1873), the first owner of this watercolour was the son of Sir Thomas Baring (1772-1848) and a partner in Baring’s bank from 1828 and until his death in 1873.

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.