Charlotte Bosanquet The Drawing Room, Fairford Park, Gloucestershire

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

Pastel over traces of pencil, signed in pen and ink on backboard: Anna Tonelli/fece in Londra/1794, inscribed on labels attached to backboard with details of sitters and its provenanceOval, in the original frame25 x 30 cm; 9 ¾ x 11 5/8 inchesProvenanceRichard Curzon-Howe, 1st Earl Howe (1796-1870)Lady de la Zouche, Hagley Hall, Rugeley, Staffordshire (according to a label on reverse of frame);Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe of Gopsall Park and Penn House (1906-1984), Buckinghamshire;Thence by family descent until 2023LiteratureN. Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online, J.722.1373The charmingly drawn sitters are the young children of the Hon. Penn Assheton Curzon (1757-1797) and Lady Sophia Charlotte Howe, Baroness Howe of Langar (1762-1835). George Augustus William Curzon (1788-1805) died aged 16 and is buried in Penn, Buckinghamshire where he shares a memorial in the church of the Holy Trinity, Penn, with his parents. His younger sister Marianne (1790-1820) was also buried at Penn.This branch of the Curzon family had houses at Penn House, near Amersham in Buckinghamshire, and Hagley Hall at Rugeley in Staffordshire, near Cannock Chase.

Stamped with estate stamp l.l., watercolour and pencil on tan paper, numbered verso in pencil: 67 (twice)16.2 x 12.9 cm.; 6 3/8 x 5 1/8 inchesProvenanceThe Estate of the artist, by descentIn February 1904 Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill left Toulouse for Paris where they took a room in the Hôtel de Mont Blanc at 19 Boulevard Edgar Quinet in the 14th arrondissement. They acquired a female tortoiseshell cat with a white breast which Gwen John named after the street and drew frequently, and which would appear to be the subject of the present drawing which dates from around 1905-1908.Gwen John had many cats throughout her life, and when Edgar Quinet disappeared in 1908 she wrote a poem in her memory entitled Au Chat which she sent to Rodin. Her remarkable cat drawings capture the personality of the animals and are understandably acclaimed.

Oil on paper26 x 31 cm.; 10 ¼ x 12 ¼ inchesProvenanceThe Artist’s EstateThis is an early work by the artist.Evelyn Dunbar was a devout and committed Christian Scientist throughout her life. Much of her work reflects her beliefs, mostly indirectly but sometimes directly. Christopher Campbell-Howes, the artist’s nephew, has suggested that this work may be an interpretation of the hymn ‘Shall We Gather by the River,’ with words adapted from the original Baptist version of Revelation 22. It begs comparison with Stanley Spencer, whose art was a significant influence on her work.The absence of men in the composition is deliberate, while the inclusion of young children and babies with the young women who make up the circle gathered around an ambiguous stone, in the centre, perhaps adds an air of mystery and female potency to the work.Evelyn Mary Dunbar was the fifth child of William Dunbar, a tailor and purveyor of household linens, and Florence (née Murgatroyd), an amateur artist known for floral still lifes. Dunbar's childhood and adolescence were spent in Rochester, where she developed strong skills in draughtsmanship and composition, as well as a sophisticated sense of colour. Dunbar was encouraged by her mother and her aunt, and she was awarded an exhibition to the Royal College of Art in 1929, where she was greatly influenced by William Rothenstein, Allan Gwynne-Jones, Alan Sorrell, Percy Horton and Charles Mahoney. In her fourth and postgraduate year she was invited by Mahoney, her mural tutor, to join a team to decorate the hall at Brockley Grammar School for Boys (now Prendergast Hilly Fields School) with an extensive series of murals, mostly based on Aesop's fables. Started in 1933, they were inaugurated to acclaim in 1936.In December 1939 Sir William Rothenstein suggested she should apply for employment as a war artist. She was given the remit of recording the Home Front of women's war time activities. Dunbar was the only female artist to be given a series of rolling employment contracts throughout the war, and by 1945 had completed 44 works.In 1942 Dunbar married Roger Folley, a horticultural economist then serving in the RAF. While Folley worked at Oxford University, Dunbar taught at the Ruskin School of Art. She painted biblical and literary allegorical paintings at this period. In 1950 Folley was appointed to a senior post at Wye College, in Kent where the couple moved. Landscape and portraiture began to occupy her, and her only solo exhibition, held in Wye in 1953, reflected her wider subject matter (See Christopher Campbell-Howes, Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting, 2016).A retrospective of Dunbar’s work entitled Lost Works was held at Pallant House, Chichester, in 2015.

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.