The Fine Art Society at 150: 1876 - 2026

Philip Eglin (b.1959)

Rosso, 2024

earthenware with slip decoration

26 x 23 x 19 inches       66 x 58 x 48 cm

PROVENANCE

The artist's studio

After completing his studies in ceramics, Philip Eglin gained renown for his earthenware figures. His work has gone on to include buckets, plates and jugs at scale and smaller, more intimate tablewares. In 2025, Eglin was selected as a finalist in the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize with Rosso as his submission. 

Rosso draws inspiration from a study of 15th-century Italian maiolica drug jars, as observed and drawn by Eglin at the Bargello Museum, Florence. Although he deliberately conceived the form on a grand scale, this presented both technical and physical challenges. Its imposing scale predetermined that a number of large clay sheets would need to be laid out side by side in a continuous run to allow for a flow of painted, poured and dribbled marks, a subtle nod to Rauschenberg’s 22-foot long Automobile Tire Print (1953). The intuitive treatment of surface and colour has also been informed by both 18th-century English slipwares and the gestural paintings of Cy Twombly. Eglin speaks of bringing together the past and the present: “I wanted to acknowledge the tradition of slipware whilst at the same time attempting to revitalise and reinvigorate it for the present.” 

The piecing together of the sheets presented Eglin with an exciting unpredictability through the inevitable distortions that occur as they follow the contours of the walls of the mould. Each pressing has distinctive characteristics. The timing of release from the mould is critical: too soon, and the vessel would collapse under its own weight; too late and the vessel would be too firm to alter without cracking. Rosso expresses exuberance and bravado on a grand scale.

Emily Young FRSB (b.1951)

The Serpent Head, 2025

serpentinite

15 3/4 x 8 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches       40 x 22 x 30 cm

PROVENANCE
The artist's studio

In the early 1980s Emily Young abandoned painting and started carving exclusively in stone. Her primary objective is to bring the natural beauty and energy of the stone to the fore, showing each specimen’s physical properties. The stone’s geological history and geographical source lend each of Young’s sculptures a unique character. Her work falls broadly into three categories of torsos, discs and monolithic heads such as this one. Her choice of stone is careful and specific and her interpretation and interrogation of it is what marks her out. 

Serpentinite is a metamorphic rock composed predominantly of serpentine group minerals formed 160 million years ago when peridotite, a rock rich in iron and magnesium, was thrust upwards from beneath the earth’s crust. The stone is a result of serpentinisation, a form of metamorphism involving heated seawater far below the ocean. This stone has been well known for thousands of years for its versatility in a wide range of uses. As early as the Neolithic period, it was used to make long axe blades for ritual ceremonies and other decorative objects. In Italy, notably Florence, it was used in Renaissance architectural work such as green marble inlays of some church facades.

Jennifer McRae RSA (b.1959)

Self Portrait at Work, Tuscany, 2024

signed and dated 2024

watercolour and ink on paper

33 x 23 1/2 inches       89 x 60 cm

PROVENANCE

The artist's studio

In the autumn of 2024, McRae was awarded an alumni residency at Pignano, Tuscany through the Royal Drawing School Residency Programme and courtesy of Sir Michael Moritz and Harriet Heymen. Travel has long been a stimulus for Jennifer, she welcomes the opportunity to be tested by the unknown. As someone who is drawn by the urban landscape and faces, the remote and rural setting of Pignano was a timely challenge. In Jennifer’s own words, she describes the work above:

“The Pignano set up is blessed with a large light filled room and a vast central worktable. It proved perfect for working during the Tuscan October downpours where rain stopped outdoor play and electric storms added a tingly drama to the isolation. After the rain a beautiful clarity of light would fill the room, highlighting every crumb of the working minutiae. It was intense, weird and wonderful. I am at my table, right hand resting and left hand at work.  There is a smell of fresh cypress in the damp air from the side window and Brian Cox’s dulcet tones playing McClevey on my iPhone.”

Best known for her insightful portraiture, Jennifer’s roll call of sitters is impressive and amongst them recently she counts Brian Cox and a commission to paint the first female RSA president, Joyce Cairns. Whilst these are often oil paintings, drawing remains of equal importance to her. Her palette brings unexpected pairings, vibrant pockets of colour that create an energy in an otherwise still life. Jennifer’s work can be found in several public collections including The National Portrait Gallery, London and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh amongst others.

Jennifer McRae RSA (b.1959)

Adrian, Pignano, 2024

inscribed 'Pignano '24'

watercolour, gouache and ink on Khadi paper

PROVENANCE

The artist's studio

Sir Peter Blake RA (b.1932)

Late period - Study for 'Party' 4, 2018

signed, titled and dated 2018

watercolour on paper

10 1/4 x 7 inches       26 x 18 cm

PROVENANCE

Waddington Custot; private collection, England

EXHIBITED

Waddington Custot, Peter Blake: A Life in Drawings and Watercolours, London, 5 July - 8 September 2018, cat. no. 149

LITERATURE

Waddington Custot, Peter Blake: A Life in Drawings and Watercolours (London 2018), exh. cat.

Pioneer of British Pop Art and master draughtsman, Blake works across the mediums of paint, collage and print. One of Britain’s most famous living artists, his first ever exhibition of drawings and works on paper, A Life in Drawings and Watercolours 1945-2018 (Waddington Custot, London), documented his output from childhood. This powerful, small watercolour comes from a series made for that solo exhibition. Blake terms these his 'Party Watercolours', an array of colour and celebration depicting imaginary children's parties with guests jostling and laughing alongside a mass of balloons. The group is made up of three large watercolours and eight small studies of which this is one. He describes them as containing something "a little bit dark." The saturated colours convey a celebratory atmosphere, the picture plane is broken with falling confetti, but there’s a tension.

Kenny Hunter (b.1962)

Young Olympians, 2012

each signed inside the base

painted bronze, edition of 2 artist's proofs

24 3/4 x 7 1/4 inches each       63 x 18.5 cm

PROVENANCE

The artist's studio

Four young athletes stand poised, ready for action; their concentrated gaze, the moment of mental preparation, precedes sudden movement. In Young Olympians, Kenny Hunter embodies the potential of youth. His practice as a sculptor has always been to compound a sculptural archetype; by taking sporting contemporary sitters, he produces something simultaneously contemporary and historical. Cast in bronze, Hunter has chosen to paint them white; a nod to high-tech sportswear and contemporary culture but it also aligns them with the classical. Historical athletic sculpture does not address individuality: there is no diversity of sex, race or ability. The idealised male form dominates. By rejecting the tradition, he presents us with a group that celebrates commitment and endurance, motivation and will – and offers a different and confident interpretation of beauty and perfection.

Hunter is largely known for his high profile, public commissioned works that include Citizen Firefighter (2001) outside Glasgow’s Central Station, iGoat (2010) in Spitalfields, Blackbird (the persistence of vision) for Leicester Square (2016) and The Southwark Memorial to War and Reconciliation (2018). In Edinburgh in 2022 he was commissioned to create a covid memorial at the Royal College of Surgeons, entitled Your Next Breath, for which he received the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture in 2023.

John Byrne RSA (1940 – 2023)

R & B, 2002

signed

oil on board

48 x 36 inches       122 x 91.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, England

EXHIBITED

Glasgow Print Studio, John Byrne: recent works, Glasgow, 2002

In 1971 John Byrne and his family spent three months in Los Angeles while Byrne and singer Donovan Leitch worked on a project for an animated film. That was his first contact with the actual America, as opposed to the mythic source of the food parcels, comics, clothes and records of his childhood. The encounter was a strange mixture of fascination and disappointment. Byrne found the denizens of LA’s Sunset Boulevard and the film business at once too laid-back and anxiety ridden. He felt more of a kinship with black musicians he encountered. This would become a motif that Byrne developed across a series of works where the guitar becomes a character as important as the player itself. 

This picture was part of a larger group shown at Glasgow Print Studio in 2002. On discovering the cause of his mother’s mental illness, John painted a series of harrowing images, most of which have since been destroyed. It is hard to see how this picture contributes to the story of his mother’s illness and is perhaps why it survives. It does however fit stylistically with the group as a whole in its scale and graphic depiction of the figures. 

Emily Young FRSB (b.1951)

Male Torsos, 1998-99

Courville limestone on Portland stone bases

each: 40 1/4 x 10 1/4 x 5 inches       102 x 26 x 13 cm

bases: 6 x 10 1/4 x 5 inches       15.5 x 26 x 13 cm

PROVENANCE

Commissioned by Andrew McIntosh Patrick, 1998

In 1998, early in her career as a sculptor, Emily Young accepted Andrew McIntosh Patrick’s commission to carve two male torsos. Made from Courville Limestone, they sat either side of a fireplace in Andrew’s Charing Cross flat. The sculptor recalls the commission of ’the boys' warmly; he had recently bought a small table top torso and based upon this, he engaged with Emily to scale up. Upon retirement as Managing Director of The Fine Art Society, Andrew sold virtually all his paintings, decorative arts and furniture ahead of his move to a new chapter in Morocco. A very few items went with him including these. And so, for over 20 years, these have sat either side of his sitting room fireplace in Dar Patrick on the outskirts of Taroudant. 

Throughout the month of August, we will display a room of Andrew’s Moroccan belongings on the first floor of the Edinburgh gallery. His style came to encapsulate much that people recall of The Fine Art Society and his move to Morocco made no exception of his desire to decorate. 

David Inshaw (b.1943)

Blind Man's Buff, Interior, 1983

oil on canvas

54 x 48 inches       137 x 122 cm

PROVENANCE

Waddington Galleries Ltd., London; Theo Waddington Fine Art Ltd., London; The Fine Art Society, London, 2013; private collection, Edinburgh

EXHIBITED

Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, London, 1986; The Fine Art Society, Paintings by David Inshaw, London, April-May 2013, cat. no. 4

The figure has been a continuing and central subject in Inshaw’s art, in particular his treatment of the nude. The surrealist mood of Blind Man’s Buff deflects the voyeurism: the stillness of a moment stopped in time. The critic Andrew Lambirth described his nudes as "well aware of their sexuality. Provocative but decorous...They are much of the here and now, unidealised and prepossessing."

In 1975, with his friend Peter Blake, Inshaw co-founded the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of seven artists. The following summer they exhibited in the Royal Academy under a banner proclaiming the group’s name. There was never a formal manifesto but as Blake explained, "Simply our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, English landscape, the Pre-Raphaelites etc ... Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic. We still believe in painting with oil paint on canvas.” Such a declaration at this date was a radical one. Their list of heroes was far from fashionable, and the art world was dominated by abstraction and a wave of conceptualism that abandoned tradition.

Will Maclean RSA (b.1941)

Interior, Wester Ross, 1980

signed and dated 1980; signed, titled and dated verso

carved and painted wood box construction

54 3/4 x 22 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches       139 x 56.5 x 22.2 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, London

LITERATURE

D. Macmillan, Symbols of Survival: The Art of Will Maclean (Edinburgh 1992) pp. 40, 113, cat. no. 53, pl. 24

For three years, from the age of sixteen, Will worked as a midshipman before embarking on evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art and, thereafter, at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. He worked again as a ring net fisherman after art school before transforming his experiences at sea into the Ring-Net Project, over 400 drawings which are now in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

The cultural history of Scotland, particularly Highland tradition and the hardships of the Clearances are central to Will’s work. His tactile, seemingly organic mixed media constructions seem as much an artifact of history as an artistic representation of it. Rather than expressly laying out a narrative, Maclean crafts his artworks with symbolism and semi-abstracted form.

Interior, Wester Ross, by contrast, is a much more literal representation of a domestic interior with details of ordinary life, all of them made of carved or turned wood. It is, in part, a portrait of the artist’s uncle and aunt, crofters and fisherman, Angus and Morag McKenzie of Polbain, Wester Ross; a home that Will spent time in as a child and recalls fondly. 

Betty Blandino (1927 – 2011)

Lipped Vessel

impressed with artist's mark

stoneware

7 1/2 x 6 x 5 3/4 inches           19 x 15 x 14.5 cm

After a lengthy career as a teacher and an arts administrator, it was only in 1973 that Betty Blandino made the bold decision to pursue pottery full-time. She quickly became one of the finest studio potters in Britain and was a key figure in the renaissance of handbuilding which took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Her works transcended traditional boundaries, blurring the line between art and craft with their sculptural complexity and refined aesthetic. Blandino, like several other major potters including John Ward and Jennifer Lee, made work that was meticulous and controlled with subtle, quiet surfaces. Her work evolved slowly and only rarely diverted into the use of radically different forms or materials. 

The work is almost always asymmetrical and her shapes, even when massive, are deceptively light. The surface texture created by her fingers and scraping is enhanced by the decoration. Usually this is a white slip painted on and then rubbed off; and coloured oxides (most often blue or green) are rubbed into the surface. She was never interested in making functional pots, preferring the tactile and sculptural possibilities of the vessel form. While she often made small forms, she was at her best when working on a larger scale. “Changing the soft, lumpen clay into a permanent form of dignity is the essence of my work,” she said. “Ideally I want each shape to spring up with its own unique life — a calm, poised, aloof, mysterious object.” Blandino wrote two books on ceramics: Coiled Pottery, Traditional and Contemporary Ways (1985, 2003), and The Figure in Fired Clay (2001). Her insightful writings provided invaluable guidance to aspiring ceramicists, further cementing her legacy as a trailblazer in the field.

Gerald Laing (1936 – 2011)

Bilith, 1971

woven by Brose Patrick (Scotland) Ltd., Loch Ussie (maker)

signed and dated 1971 on canvas label verso

woollen tapestry

79 x 51 inches       201 x 130 cm

PROVENANCE

The artist's estate, catalogue raisonné no. T13

LITERATURE

Gerald Laing, Gerald Laing: An Autobiography, unpublished manuscript, 2011, ch. 34

In 1970, Gerald Laing started a tapestry company, Brose Patrick (Scotland) Ltd. near Kinkell Castle, the artist’s home. For four years the studio produced over fifty large tapestries from Laing’s own designs, as well as those of Allen Jones, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Julien Rousseau.

Bilith refers to a series of monumental outdoor steel and stone sculptures that Laing developed between 1970-71 around Kinkell Castle on the Black Isle. “I began fabricating the sculpture in order to produce works with a proper and tangible volume. This tranche of work I developed from the earlier ‘Pins’; it was made in answer to the new environment in which I now lived and refers to the enigmatic prehistoric standing stones which are scattered in the landscape. The first of the group were called ‘Biliths’, composed as they were of two standing components.”

In his Pop work, Laing had already been experimenting with inventively shaped canvases. His abstract sculpture neatly followed on, moving away from figurative content. Laing abandoned the use of canvases, which became more cumbersome as the complexity of their shape increased, in favour of metal, which was worked and finished largely using techniques derived from custom car manufacture. Following his move to the Scottish Highlands in 1969, Laing began working with local blacksmiths to create huge steel versions of the abstract forms that he had developed in New York.

Robert Welch (1929 - 2000)

Decanter, 1968

Ernest Race (1913 – 1964)

Bottleship Mark 2, 1963

manufactured by John Alan Designs for Isokon Furniture Company, London

cherry plywood

17 x 21 3/4 x 17 inches       43 x 55 x 43 cm

image includes the blown glass and silver decanter by Robert Welch, 1968, listed above

LITERATURE

D. and B. Young, Furniture in Britain Today (London 1964); H. Conway, Ernest Race (London 1982); A. Grieve, Isokon (London 2004) pg.  43

This iconic 1960s mini bar/bookcase/side table was designed by Ernest Race in 1963 at the invitation of Isokon's founder Jack Pritchard to redesign the original bottleship by Egon Riss. Isokon had ceased production following the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to rely on the thin, shapeable plywood from Finland that Isokon had utilised before the war, Race's new designs for the company employed a thicker, rigid plywood that enabled a knock-down construction. It could be flat packed and posted directly to customers. 

The Bottleship Mark II was produced in far more limited production in comparison to Race's more ubiquitous Isokon Penguin Donkey, which was produced until 1980. Available in either birch or cherry ply and of similar dimensions to the Penguin Donkey, the Bottleship's ingenious design incorporates a bookcase/magazine rack to the sides, internal sections for storing six full sized bottles and glasses, and a hinged lid to provide a table surface, with cut-out hand holds to the sides to allow it to be moved easily as required.

Ernest Race was a key figure in the British furniture design industry in the 1900s, skilled in his use of ingenious manufacturing processes to create contemporary furniture from improvised or recycled materials. After visiting a weaving village in India in 1937, Ernest returned to London and opened a shop in Knightsbridge to sell textiles and carpets. He did not start designing furniture until just after World War II, when he answered an advertisement from engineer, J. W. Noel Jordan. His best-known designs are the BA3 aluminium chair of 1945 and the Antelope chair, designed for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

John Piper (1903 – 1992)

Petworth, 1958

for David Whitehead Ltd. (maker)

screen-printed cotton

63 x 48 inches       160 x 122 cm

In the 1950s, David Whitehead & Sons was one of Lancashire’s success stories, selling contemporary textiles around the globe and employing tens of thousands of people. They were known for cutting edge design and their name was linked to some of the UK’s top avant-garde artists including Terence Conran, the sculptor Henry Moore and John Piper. 

Petworth (often referred to as Columns and Busts) was commissioned from John Piper in 1958. Its inspiration came from the classical sculpture collection at Petworth House and Park (National Trust). The richly figured marble plinths supporting the various classical busts are still to be seen in the North Gallery of the house. This particular textile design was referred to by the Piper family as 'Dame Edith, Edith Rose', as they thought the busts resembled Edith Sitwell and Rose Macaulay. However, despite the aesthetic quality of this beautiful screen print it is thought that it had only one printing, and although it received some advanced publicity in The Ambassador Magazine and some Whitehead promotional shots, very little made its way to retail.

In the correspondence between John Piper and George Butler of David Whitehead Ltd., there is mention of an alternative coloured version being developed, but the surviving examples are all in this colour-way. It is Piper’s rarest design and considered one of the most special of British 20th century textiles. 

Eduardo Paolozzi RA (1924 – 2005)

and Nigel Henderson (1917 – 1985)

Barkcloth, 1954-57

for Hammer Prints Ltd. (maker)

screen-printed cotton twill

62 x 46 inches       157.5 x 116.5 cm

LITERATURE

V. Walsh, N. Henderson, Parallel of Life and Art (London 2001) pg. 138; G. Rayner, R. Chamberlain, A. Stapleton, Artists' Textiles in Britain 1945-1970: A Democratic Art (London 2003) pg .52

Despite being an artist who had recently trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and who was better known as a sculptor and draughtsman, when Paolozzi joined the Central School of Arts, London, in December 1949, he took up a post as a tutor in Textile Design. This unlikely appointment proved critical for the formulation of his thinking and practice during the post-war years. He made a significant contribution to the culture of experimentation, collaboration and cross-disciplinary practice that flourished at the art school after the Second World War. 

In 1954, Paolozzi established the commercial company Hammer Prints with his neighbour, fellow artist Nigel Henderson. The company specialised in producing a vast range of fabrics, wallpaper and ceramics with an edgy, subversive appeal. Their idea was to create an antidote to the quaint florals of Arts and Crafts so synonymous with British textiles. Instead, they mined a vast range of visual sources high and low, from Abstract Expressionist squiggles and scrawls to junk shop paraphernalia, children’s book illustrations and marine wildlife. Although they were slow to catch on, and the company closed in 1975, the radical patterns of Hammer Prints have since become recognised as iconic emblems of their time.

This is an extremely rare, early printing of Paolozzi’s Barkcloth textile. It formed part of a furnishing commission that was undertaken, c.1956, at what is now Truro and Penwith College. Barkcloth was designed by Eduardo Paolozzi in the summer of 1955 and first printed as a textile by Hammer Prints Ltd. in 1956. This textile is from the earliest production period, when the artists were hand screen printing their own textiles and wallpapers prior to sub-contracting them to Hull Traders Ltd. and Coles Trading Ltd. who were to take on the marketing and printing. There are a handful of pieces surviving including this example. Identical pieces from the same commission are in the V&A, London and MOMA, New York.

Anne Redpath OBE ARA RSA (1895 – 1965)

Flowers on a White Table, c.1950

signed; titled on exhibition label verso

oil on panel

20 x 24 inches       51 x 61 cm

PROVENANCE

Portland Gallery, London, 2008; private collection, Scotland

EXHIBITED

Scottish Society of Women Artists, Edinburgh; Portland Gallery, Anne Redpath, London, 22 July - 15 August 2008, no. 20

Redpath moved to Edinburgh in 1949 from her native Borders. Still life painting was particularly important to her at that time and almost half of her exhibits were flowers in vases and jugs or potted plants on tabletops. In a broadcast in 1940, she described her love of colour: "I am someone who is very interested in colour – and by that, I mean bright colour, gay colour; but at the same time, if you are a colourist, you like quiet colour as well and I think this love of gay colour is contrasted in my mind with this love of whites and greys." Throughout the 1940s and 50s, the cool background tone allowed her to investigate colour as she has done here in an arrangement of bold, primary-coloured garden flowers daringly set against a monochrome backdrop. 

Redpath’s use of white in her pictures was also particular. She had a deep regard for surface texture and sought to create a dry chalky appearance: “I have loved painting white . . . you use black because it makes the white more intensified or gives it more quality.” Here the black not only intensifies the white but also the jewel-like colours of the flowers. Unusually, Redpath has included nothing of the room behind the still life preferring instead to use the curve of the table to play with perspective, lending as it does a clear structure against which to set the shapes and colours of a joyful bunch of flowers.

SOLD

Clare Atwood (1866 – 1962)

The Terry Family, Four Generations, 1953

signed and dated 1953

oil on canvas

40 x 39 3/4 inches       101.5 x 101 cm

EXHIBITED

Graves Art Gallery, Famous British Women Artists, Sheffield, 1953, no. 5

Here, in an imagined scene, are four generations of the Terry family dynasty. Amongst them are Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, two of the greatest British stage actors. Ellen’s children – Edith, seated centre, and her brother Gordon Craig – are included. Clare ‘Tony’ Atwood and Edith ‘Edy’ Craig were partners. This picture was painted and exhibited only a few years after Edy died in 1947; it remained in the artist’s collection until her death. Edy followed her mother into the theatre, first as an actress and later as a director, producer and designer. From 1911 onwards she staged some 150 plays for the avant-garde theatre society The Pioneer Players, a Suffragist theatre troupe. 

Atwood’s training and artistic career is a familiar success story, albeit exceptional for a woman artist. She studied at the Slade and exhibited regularly with the New English Art Club, where she became a member in 1912. She was one of the few women artists to receive official commissions during the First World War, including from the Imperial War Museum. In her personal life, she was even more radical. After the war she cohabited in a same-sex ménage à trois with ‘Edy’ Craig and Christabel Marshall, the suffragette, playwright and author, who took the name ‘Chris St. John’. Living in the heart of the West End theatre scene, Atwood, Craig and Marshall were highly socially and culturally engaged. They hosted the first gatherings of The Pioneer Players, and socialised with the literary Bloomsbury Group, especially Vita Sackville-West. Despite being well regarded by her peers, her shy character, gender and unconventional social life as a queer, polyamorous woman perhaps cost her the critical acclaim she deserves.

John Minton (1917 – 1957)

Portrait of Eric Verrico, 1947-48

signed, inscribed 'John Minton Italian Boy, Oil 1947-8' verso 

oil on canvas

42 x 32 inches       107 x 82 cm

PROVENANCE

The Lefevre Galleries, London; Collection of Muriel Belcher; Collection of Basil Wright Esq; Christie’s, London, 13 December 1961, as Portrait of Eric Verigo (lot 238); Christie’s, London, 26 May 1995 (lot 8); Private collection UK; The Fine Art Society, London, 2007; The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, 2020, where bought by current owner

EXHIBITED

New Burlington Galleries, London, , Manchester City Art Gallery, Arts Council Festival of Britain, British Painting 1925-1950: First Anthology, May-July 1951, as 'The Italian Boy', no. 45 , Tate Gallery London; travelled to Towner Art Gallery and Museum, Eastbourne; Blackburn Art Gallery; Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery; Bristol City Art Gallery; Victoria Street Art Gallery, Nottingham, Arts Council Commemorative Exhibition, John Minton 1917-1957, An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Illustrations, October 1958-April 1959, no. 12

Portrait of Eric Verrico is a major work from a series of portraits of the sitter executed by John Minton between 1945-48. It has rarely been exhibited since the artist’s Commemorative Exhibition in 1958, when it was in the possession of the notorious Soho club owner, Muriel Belcher. The work is concerned with the transience of youth and beauty, a significant theme of Minton’s oeuvre. 

Graham Sutherland OM (1903 – 1980)

Tree root, c.1939

ink and watercolour on paper

9 x 6 3/4 inches       23 x 17 cm

PROVENANCE

A gift from Sutherland to the artist Paul Drury; and thence by descent

Sutherland began to make paintings in which natural objects take on an anthropomorphic aspect in 1936, but the impact of seeing Picasso's Guernica and the related studies in the art and literary journal Cahiers d'Art in 1937 drove this element of his work to be the dominant factor; using found organic objects to suggest a human presence and a deep feeling of anxiety triggered by war.

Tree Root, which depicts a fallen tree with exposed roots, was created as part of a series of preparatory work for Sutherland’s solo exhibition at Leicester Galleries in 1940. The form brings to mind the contorted limbs of Matthias Grünewald's dying Christ in his Isenheim Altarpiece (1506-15), which had previously been copied by Picasso and reproduced in Minotaur. A similar example to Tree Root, titled Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods (1940), exhibited in the aforementioned exhibition, was purchased by Tate from the artist through The Leicester Galleries in 1940. Tree Root clearly anticipates Sutherland’s much later oil Picton (1972).

Tree Root was gifted to Paul Drury; a lifelong friend of Sutherland, having met in the etching class of 1921 at Goldsmiths School of Art, where the pair would often overlap in their subject matter. Throughout the course of the 1930s, Sutherland and Drury kept in close contact, Drury visited Sutherland on occasion at his home in Wales where they continued to share motifs.

Agnes Miller Parker (1895 - 1980)

Fox, 1936

PROVENANCE

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst RA (1890 – 1978)

Dorette, 1932

signed in pencil to margin; signed and dated 1932 in plate (in reverse)

etching, printed in black ink on wove paper, an impression in the sixth (final) state, an impression from the edition of 111

9 x 7 1/4 inches       23 x 18 cm

PROVENANCE

John Camfield; The Fine Art Society, London, 2016; private collection, Edinburgh

EXHIBITED

The Fine Art Society, The Print Show, London, 15 February - 11 March 2016, no. 39

LITERATURE

H. J. L. Wright, 'The Etchings of G. L. Brockhurst', Print Collector's Quarterly (London 1935), vol. XXII, pp. 62-77, no. 72

During the 1920s Brockhurst was primarily an etcher, focusing on female portraits and using his first wife Anäis as his model. However, in 1928, when Brockhurst was appointed a visitor to the Royal Academy Schools, he met Kathleen Woodward, the sixteen-year-old student who was to supersede Anäis in Brockhurst’s life as lover, muse and later, wife.

Dorette depicts Kathleen and was executed a year before he made the oil painting of the same subject. It was the first portrait of his new model exhibited at the Royal Academy where it was bought by the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. His haunting portraits of her were to reset his career as a successful and fashionable portrait painter. In the decade that followed, Brockhurst was the most sought-after and expensive portrait painter in Britain, charging 1,000 guineas for a portrait. The number of commissions he would accept was limited to twenty per year: his famous subjects included the Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich, Merle Oberon, J. Paul Getty and Mrs Paul Mellon, Mary Mellon. His success as a portrait painter came after he was already well-established as an etcher, a career which reflected his skill as a draughtsman. In 1939 Brockhurst emigrated to America, living first in New York City and then New Jersey. There was no shortage of admirers and commissions for his meticulous technique and ability to convey a likeness.

Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976)

Armchair 41 'Paimio', 1929

for Oy Huonekalu-ja Rakennustytyötehdas AB (attributed maker)

birch laminated frame with pre-formed plywood seat 

25 3/4 x 24 x 32 1/2 inches       65.5 x 61 x 82.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Scandinavian private collection; private collection

The Paimio chair was part of Aalto’s project for the tuberculosis sanatorium in Paimio, Finland (1928-1933). The plan covered the design of the building as well as all the details like washbasins, cabinets, bathroom shelves, door handles, lighting, colour schemes and furniture. Conscious of the patients’ physical and psychological well-being, Aalto rejected the trend for tubular steel and opted for laminated birch instead. The wood made the chair warm to touch, but hygienic, easy to clean and light to lift. The angle of the backrest was designed to ease patients’ breathing. 

Phyllis Mary Bone RSA (1894 – 1972)

Panther disturbed while attacking a vulture, 1925

inscribed with signature and dated 25

bronze

8 x 20 1/4 x 9 inches including base       20.5 x 51.5 x 30 cm

PROVENANCE

Purchased from the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1926, and thence by descent

EXHIBITED

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1926, no. 17

Known for her major contribution to public buildings, notably Sir Robert Lorimer’s Scottish National War Monument at Edinburgh Castle and the Zoology department of Ashworth Laboratories (now King’s Buildings), University of Edinburgh, Bone also produced many smaller works, mostly in bronze, throughout her lengthy, prolific and successful career. 

In 1918, she gained a Diploma in Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art followed by eighteen months in Paris studying under the renowned animalier Edouard Navallier. By 1919 she was back in Edinburgh and assisting Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson. Soon commissions came directly to her and most notably for the animal sculpture at the Scottish National War Memorial. She worked throughout the building modelling all but one of the animals, both in relief and free standing: from the lion and unicorn that flank the entrance to The Humble Beasts and The Tunnellers’ Friends within and even the door handles. After completion, Lorimer continued to include Bone in his ‘team’ of independent artist-craftsmen.

SIR Muirhead Bone HRSA HRWS (1876 – 1953)

A Manhattan Excavation, 1923

signed in plate; signed in pencil to margin and initialled MB (indicating a proof reserved for the artist)

drypoint; one of 18 impressions in the 13th state of 19, edition of 151

12 1/4 x 10 inches       31 x 25.5 cm

PROVENANCE

The Fine Art Society, London, 2014; Kirkton House, Scotland

LITERATURE

C. Dodgson, MS Continuation of Etchings & Dry Points by Muirhead Bone 1897-1907 A Catalogue (London 1909) pp 136-138, no.390 xiii/XIX

Bone was a printmaker and watercolour artist noted for his depictions of architectural subjects, city views, landscapes, and his work as an artist in both the First and Second World Wars. After the First World War, Bone made fewer prints until he travelled to the United States. In this bird’s-eye view, Muirhead Bone presents a meticulously detailed construction site in Midtown Manhattan. With great observational precision, he depicts workers building the Roosevelt Hotel at 45th Street and Madison Avenue, one of the many massive construction projects underway during the economic boom of the 1920s.

Using the intaglio technique of drypoint, Bone contrasts the immense size and dramatic complexity of the excavation pit with the tiny figures of the construction workers. At the top of the image, Bone captures a bustling street intersection filled with cars and pedestrians. He spent five years completing this print, which went through 19 states before it was finally issued as an edition in 1928; it is now regarded as one of the artist’s most celebrated drypoints.

Edmund Dulac (1882 – 1953)

Design for carpet, 1920s

pencil and gouache on paper, cut in collage on cardboard

4 3/4  x 3 3/4 inches       12 x 9.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Hartnoll & Eyre Ltd., London, 1970; The Estate of John Russell Taylor

EXHIBITED

Hartnoll & Eyre Ltd., Edmund Dulac 1882-1953, London, 1970, no. 34

One of Dulac’s most celebrated collaborations was the decoration of the first-class smoking room for the great luxury liner, The Empress of Britain (1930). We don’t know if this design was part of that proposal although its date and nautical theme would certainly align. Several designers were called on to create sumptuous interiors while the naval architects of John Brown's at Clydebank designed the exterior. 

Before the war, however, Edmund Dulac was one of Britain’s foremost illustrators. He is known for his vivid watercolours, inspired by Indian and Persian miniature paintings; the influence of Orientalism became increasingly pronounced in his works as time went on. His debut as a book illustrator came at a time when a new method of printing in colour was introduced into the book industry. Four-colour process blocks allowed colour to be printed more accurately from the originals than before, which showed Dulac's work to advantage. After the war, deluxe edition illustrated books became a rarity and Dulac expanded into other areas such as newspaper caricatures, portraits, theatre costume and set designs; he also designed banknotes and postage stamps, most notably the first of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. 

George Leslie Hunter (1877 - 1931)

Still Life with Tapestry

PROVENANCE

Mabel Allington Royds (1874 – 1941)

Rooftops, Benares, c.1914-15

oil on canvasboard

13 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches       34 x 24 cm

PROVENANCE

The artist's family by descent; Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, 2004; private collection, Brighton and London

EXHIBITED

Celia Philo and Company, London, March - April 1990, no. 4

Royd’s sense of adventure and determination was evident from the start: having won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools, she kept it a secret from her parents in favour of attending the Slade School. From there she went to Paris where she met and worked with Sickert, to whom she was devoted, even working on some of his paintings. She then sailed to Canada where she taught and travelled extensively. In 1911, she returned to Britain and joined the staff of Edinburgh College of Art alongside J. D. Fergusson, S. J. Peploe and her future husband, the printmaker, Ernest Lumsden. They married in 1913 and their honeymoon took them through Europe to Port Said and Bombay. They returned to India in 1914 after Ernest had been rejected by the British Army on medical grounds: he joined the Indian Army instead. They made a long and adventurous trek into the Himalayas in 1916, paying for their lodgings in monasteries by painting portraits of the monks. 

Royd’s Indian sketchbooks show interest in the decorative patterns and colours which she found there; it was a style which particularly suited her woodcut print work. In the rooftop view illustrated here, the patchwork of buildings and their close toned facades of red sandstone and aging plaster nod to the influence of Sickert. However, the subject and treatment of it is very much her own.

SOLD

Samuel John Peploe RSA (1871 – 1935)

Roses, 1911

signed

oil on board

16 x 13 inches       40.5 x 33 cm

PROVENANCE

T. & R. Annan and Sons, Glasgow; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; private collection, London

EXHIBITED

The Scottish Gallery, The Modern Spirit in Scottish Painting II, Edinburgh, July 1986, cat. no. 78; Portland Gallery, SJ Peploe, London, November 2012, no. 25

Between 1900 and 1910 Peploe lived in Paris. His palette, lighter than that of the mid 1890s, was made up of bold and vivid colours. His curiosity of developments in avant garde painting underpinned his pursuit of modernity. Upon his return to Edinburgh his still-lifes became more angular and structured with the individual forms almost taking second place to an abstract design. Less evident here in its reproduction is the plasticity of the oil paint; there is greater pleasure to be found viewing in person, each brushstroke visible and the artist’s intentions clear and focused.

Encouragement for this international approach came from the experiences of The Glasgow Boys, many of whom were only a decade older than Peploe. Not only had they studied on the continent, but they then exhibited abroad, in America as well as in Europe, a path that Peploe and his fellow colourists were to follow. This broader approach meant that both schools initially kept up with the rapid cultural developments of their time. In Peploe’s case, his work never stopped changing and developing.

In his 1924 introduction to the catalogue for the Colourist exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, Walter Sickert, one of the greatest and most intelligent British painters of 20th century, wrote of Peploe’s early work that it had "carried on a certain kind of delicious skill to a pitch of virtuosity."

Johann Heinrich Vogeler (1872 – 1942)

Table and chairs (pair), c.1910

for Worpsweder Werkstätte (maker)

incised marks 'H V/ W' on reverse of chair seats (Heinrich Vogeler, Worpsweder Werkstätte)

oak and drop in rush seats

Table: 28 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches       72.5 x 90 x 75 cm

chairs: 39 1/4 x 18 1/2 x 18 inches         100 x 47 x 46 cm

Vogeler, a painter, designer and architect, was a founding member of the artists’ colony in Worpswede, Lower Saxony. He joined following his studies at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 1894. A year later, he bought a house, Barkenhoff, so called because of the many birch trees he planted which gave the house its new name. It was to become the centre for the artists’ colony which, at its height, counted around 130 artists, writers and poets including Rainer Maria Rilke with whom Vogeler had a close friendship. 

During a trip to Łódź, Poland, he studied the Russian and Soviet writer and proponent of Socialism, Maxim Gorky, which resulted in a deep sympathy for the working class. This was heightened following a visit to the UK when he saw firsthand the slums of Glasgow and Manchester. In 1908, he and his brother Franz founded the Worpsweder Werkstätte to produce well designed household objects and furniture. “I am trying to find a connection to old folk art,” he wrote in 1907, “and create a practical value for the modern man.”

His interior fittings for the Güldenkammer, the Golden Chamber, in the old town hall of Bremen in 1905 stands as one of the most significant and best preserved examples of the Jugendstil and applied arts reform in Germany. After the November Revolution and subsequent failure of Barkenhoff as a commune, Vogeler bequeathed his possessions to the Rote Hilfe, a German affiliate of the International Red Aid, as a rest home for the children of victims of political persecution. 

Sir David Young Cameron RA RSA HRSW RE (1865 – 1945)

The Woods and Waters, Badenoch

signed; signed and inscribed with title on stretcher

oil on canvas

22 1/2 x 28 inches       57 x 71 cm

Cameron turned to the austere beauty of Scotland’s wilderness in the early 20th century. His style was individual and altered little during his life. The palette of his work was the only element that changed radically: from sober and muted greys and browns early in the century to vivid blues, reds and golds by the 1930s. From the beginning of his painting career, he eliminated extraneous detail, which gave his landscapes an ascetic sublimity and drama. His aim was to show “that spell of mystic beauty, haunted by strangeness of form and colour, remote from the facts and feelings of common life."

Cameron's attitude to colour changed in 1921/22 during a period spent recuperating from a heart attack in the south of France. Like many before and after him he saw light and colour in a way he had not done before. On his return to Scotland he filled his pictures with glowing, vibrant colour. The flamboyant colouring might seem incongruous with the austere, pared down landscape he painted and yet he always remained true to what he saw.

Jacob Esptein (1880 – 1959)

Romilly John, 1907

lifetime cast, no. 8 from the edition of 9

bronze

11 3/4 x 6 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches       30 x 16 x 22 cm

PROVENANCE

Kathleen Esther Garman (Lady Epstein); Edward P. Schinman; private collection; Martin Diamond; private collection

EXHIBITED

The Jewish Museum, The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in Britain, 1900-1945, New York, May - October 1983

LITERATURE

B. van Dieren, Epstein (New York 1920) pl. xiv (as Head of a Boy); J. Epstein, Let there be Sculpture: An Autobiography (London 1940) ill. pg. 202 and ref. pg. 354; R. Black, The Art of Jacob Epstein (New York 1942) no. 2, pl. 87; R. Buckle, Epstein Drawings (London 1962) pp. 22-23, pl. 16-17; B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and his Friends (New York 1968) pg. 191;

E. P. and B. A. Schinman (eds.), Jacob Epstein: A Catalogue of the Collection of Edward P. Schinman (New Jersey 1970) ill. pg. 94; E. Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, with a Complete Catalogue (Oxford 1986) pp. 15, 19, 120, cat. no. 8, ill. 4; J. Collins, ‘Early Carvings, 1908-1912’, in E. Silber, T. Friedman (eds.), Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds 1989) pp. 133-141; Anon, Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein & Dora Gordine (London 2006), ill. pg. 13 (another version)

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857 – 1941)

Looking glass, c.1905

for Arthur W. Simpson (1879-1922) (attributed maker)

labelled 'The Victorian Society / 000071’

oak with brass hardware

21 3/4 x 22 3/4 x 7 inches       55.5 x 57.5 x 18 cm

PROVENANCE

Probably Sydney Claridge Turner, The Homestead, Frinton-on-Sea; later in the offices of the Essex and Suffolk Equitable Insurance Company, founded by Turner; acquired by E. H. Brooks, whose firm had taken over the Essex and Suffolk offices; donated by Brooks to the Victorian Society, 1975; sold by the Victorian Society; private collection

EXHIBITED

Art Gallery and Museum, Brighton, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Glasgow City Art Gallery, C. F. A. Voysey: architect and designer 1857-1941, 1978-1979, no. C7 (lent by the Victorian Society)

LITERATURE

A. Vallance, ‘British Decorative art in 1899’, The Studio  XVIII (October. 1899), pp. 45-46 (this work); J. Brandon-Jones and others, C. F. A. Voysey: architect and designer 1857-1941 (Brighton 1978), C7 (this work) and C50 (a related design)

John Ednie (attributed) (1876 – 1934)

Glasgow School hall chair, 1905

for Wylie and Lochhead, Glasgow (fl. 1829 - 1957) (maker)

retail label for E. P. Lawlor Ltd. to rear

oak

37 x 21 x 15 inches        94 x 53.5 x 38 cm

After completing an apprenticeship, John Ednie joined the design department at Wylie and Lochhead in Glasgow where he worked alongside George Logan and E. A. Taylor. Of the three designers, Ednie was considered the purest Glasgow style designer due to his architectural studies and the influence of Ballie Scott and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackintosh’s chequer design, the iconic grid pattern, were an often-used detail in his work and can be seen in the chair illustrated here.  

By the 1890s Wylie and Lochhead’s cabinetmaking business was the largest in Scotland, producing both avant-garde and traditional designs. The firm commissioned well-known English and Continental designers and manufacturers such as Liberty’s but also developed Scottish talent by keeping in touch with stylistic developments at the Glasgow School of Art and enlisting graduates such as Jessie M. King.

In 1901, the firm undertook the design of the Wylie and Lochhead Pavilion at The Glasgow International Exhibition. They exhibited work that toned down the more extreme innovations of designers such as Mackintosh, Herbert McNair, and Margaret and Frances Macdonald for a middle-class clientele. Its rooms were each entrusted to a single designer – the dining room to John Ednie, the library and bedroom to George Logan, and the drawing room to E. A. Taylor. 

In 1906 John Ednie left Wylie and Lochhead. Two years later, he was appointed head of the Decorative Art Department at The Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College. In 1926, he moved to London and then to Cairo in 1928, taking up the position as Director at The Cairo School of Applied Art. 

SOLD

Frederick William Pomeroy RA (1856 – 1924)

Dionysus, 1903

signed and dated 'F. W. Pomeroy. ARA SC 1903'

bronze

16 1/2 x 8 x 6 1/2 inches       42 x 20 x 16.5 cm

PROVENANCE

From the estate of Lionel Alfred Martin, Ingram Avenue, London (1855-1933), Director of Tate & Lyle

EXHIBITED

Royal Academy, London, 1890, ref. 2080 (another cast)

LITERATURE

A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: a Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904 (London 1905-06) pg. 175 (another cast); M. H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and the Sculptors of To-Day (London 1901) pg. 116 (another cast); A. L. Baldry, 'The Work of F. W. Pomeroy', The Studio XV (November 1898) pp. 77-86 (another cast)

This bronze figure of Dionysus depicts the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, pleasure and theatre who joyfully holds a cup aloft. He represents excess and the untamed aspects of the human psyche, where the fine line between chaos and celebration, revelry and recklessness are balanced. Pomeroy exhibited a cast of this sculpture in plaster at the Royal Academy in 1890 which left its mark on viewers at the time. A slightly earlier and larger cast of this figure is held in The Tate collection (1898). 

SOLD

Arthur Melville ARSA RSW (1855-1904)

Sketch for ‘Christmas Eve:

"And there was no room for them in the Inn", 1903

PROVENANCE

Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead (maker) (1894 – 1906)

Pilgrim Bottle, 1903

decorated by Cassandia Annie Walker (1875-1957)

painted on the underside with the Della Robbia maker's mark and '1903 / 331'; later paper label attached to the underside inscribed ‘19365 / Della Robbia’

glazed and painted earthenware

20 3/4 x 12 1/4 inches        53 x 31 cm

PROVENANCE

Ryan Brant collection until 2010; H. Blairman & Sons; private collection

Founded by Harold Rathbone and Conrad Dressier in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1894, The Della Robbia Pottery was named after the Florentine Della Robbia family. They had an Arts & Crafts ethos and produced Art Pottery for domestic and architectural use. Any semblance of mass production was avoided and artistic freedom of expression encouraged. They produced decorative wares such as vases, chargers, plates and tiles. In later years an Art Nouveau influence predominated, and works were sold through Liberty’s and Morris & Co.

The form of our pilgrim bottle is based directly on Renaissance prototypes. The central decoration is redolent of the ‘Glasgow Style’ and shows the influence of Herbert MacNair (1868-1955), one of the ‘The Glasgow Four’, and his wife Frances Macdonald, who taught in Liverpool between 1898 and 1905 at the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art, known as the Art Sheds. Many of the Della Robbia Pottery’s painters attended classes there, including the artist and decorator of this piece, Cassandra Annie Walker, who was one of Della Robbia's best and longest-serving designers.  She continued her studies while working for Della Robbia and signed up for classes at the Art Sheds in 1896 and 1901 respectively. Her connection to the school perhaps explains the Glasgow-style influence of the decoration.

SOLD

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (attributed) (1857 – 1941)

Donegal carpet, c.1900

manufactured by Alexander Morton & Co. (Donegal Carpet Industry) for Liberty & Co., London

hand-knotted wool

157 x 128 inches       400 x 325 cm

PROVENANCE

Y & B Bolour, Los Angeles, where acquired by Ann and Gordon Getty, San Francisco, 1995

LITERATURE

K. Livingstone, M. Donnelly, L. Parry, C. F. A. Voysey, Arts & Crafts Designer (London 2016) pp. 134-141

The designs that Voysey sold to carpet manufacturers were made up into two distinct types: economical machine-made examples for everyday use in the home, and exclusive and expensive hand-knotted rugs and carpets. By far the most spectacular use of Voysey's design for floor-coverings came with Alexander Morton & Co.'s Donegal range of hand-knotted carpets. The production of the rugs from 1897 onwards took advantage of skilled local labour in an area in need of industry in the west of Ireland and the financial inducements offered by the British government. Donegal carpets were sold mostly through Liberty's, which, in 1903, staged an exhibition of Irish Carpets at the Grafton Gallery in Bond Street, London. 

Liberty's was not the only retailer to sell these carpets; they were also stocked by Maples, Wylie & Lochhead of Glasgow (Morton's chief Scottish client for both textiles and carpets), and Millar & Beatty of Dublin. Perhaps the most distant of all suppliers of Donegals were Hunter & Witcomb of New York, who by 1899 were Morton's sole agent in the US. Within a short period of time, Donegals could be purchased throughout the US, chiefly through the 'Craftsman' shops run by Gustav Stickley, one of America's most important Arts and Crafts designers, in New York, Boston and Washington. 

Sir George Clausen RA (1852 – 1944)

Pensive (Cinderella), 1895

signed and dated 1895; signed, dated and inscribed 'Cinderella' verso

oil on canvas

18 x 14 inches       48 x 35.5 cm

EXHIBITED

New Gallery, London, 1896, no. 121; Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow, 1900, no. 89 (as Cinderella); 

The Fine Art Society, George Clausen: The Rustic Image, London, 2012, no. 25

LITERATURE

R. A. M. Stevenson, 'The New Gallery', Pall Mall Gazette, 7 April 1896, pg. 3; R. A. M. Stevenson, ‘The New Gallery II’, Pall Mall Gazette, 1 May 1896, pg. 9; K. McConkey, George Clausen and the picture of English rural life (Edinburgh 2012) pg. 117, ill. fig. 190, pp. 118-9, 224 (notes 103-5)

Unlike other head studies in his sequence of ‘peasant portraits’, Pensive shows a girl in a dark interior, in the glow of firelight. Having started to record threshing and winnowing scenes in local barns around 1895, Clausen was preoccupied by the effects of light in interiors. These experiments continued in the present work where, to convey a presence, looming in the darkness, the painter resorts to tiny strokes that reinforce the highlights rather than the contours of head and hands. This method of shading local colour with the tip of the brush had developed from the painter’s use of pastel as a drawing medium in the previous five years and continued to the end of the century. During these years, Clausen was under contract to Goupil and Co., the celebrated international dealership, managed in London by David Croal Thomson. A regular visitor to Clausen’s studio at Widdington, Thomson would take the painter’s smaller works in return for payments on account. Such a visit on 20 October 1895 is noted in the artist’s account book and includes Pensive, a picture of a teenage girl named Lizzie Deller. Beside the entry, the artist has written in tiny, almost illegible script, the word ‘Cinderella’, the title later adopted for the picture and possibly suggested by Thomson.

James Watterston Herald (1859 – 1914)

Travelling Fair, 1890

signed and dated 90

watercolour on paper

6 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches       17 x 25 cm

EXHIBITED

Likely exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1890, as Kirriemuir Fair, no. 540

Herald soon realised the limitations that a small town such as his hometown of Arbroath presented in terms of artistic training.  However, rather than going to Edinburgh, he enrolled at the Art School at Bushey, Hertfordshire. He stayed only one term, but the move brought him closer to London and its galleries and into the milieu of fellow Scots, James Pryde and William Nicholson who were enjoying critical and commercial success as the Beggarstaff Brothers. He shared lodgings with them but was quick to develop his own highly individual style and technique in both watercolour and pastel.  His watercolours have often been compared to Arthur Melville’s and certainly there is an affinity in their ‘wet’, blottesque technique. He painted on a black, grey or brown ground which allowed his coloured highlights to resonate.

Herald was content to follow his own path with little regard to convention or artistic trends. His return to Arbroath gave distance from urban artistic centres and he struggled to achieve further success. His removal from the London art scene likely prevented his reputation from flourishing in the manner it might otherwise have during his lifetime. 

We can’t be sure that this is Kirriemuir Fair as it is hard to determine the surrounding building, however a painting by this title was exhibited at the RSA in the same year. 

Christopher Dresser (1834 – 1904)

Jug, c.1890

for James Couper and Sons, Glasgow (1850-1922) (maker)

etched on the underside 'Clutha/JCS/Registered'

glass

7 x 10 x 8 3/4 inches       18 x 25.5 x 22.5 cm

PROVENANCE

John Jesse, 1998; private collection

‘Clutha’, the ancient name for the River Clyde which runs through Glasgow, is the name given to this group of glassware made by James Couper & Sons. Christopher Dresser was the first to design Clutha art glass for the firm and was sole designer from 1888, when it was trademarked, until 1896. Liberty & Co. was one of the major retailers of Clutha glass, which, when sold through them, was usually marked CLUTHA in Celtic script with a facsimile signature.

The present design was inspired by Cycladic forms. Several similar glass jugs are known, some bearing Dresser’s name. Many Clutha vessels correspond to Linthorpe shapes which reflect Dresser's later, more organic style, while others are clearly new inventions peculiarly suited to the medium of glass. 

In an article written in 1870-3 in the Technical Educator, Christopher Dresser describes his view on glass as a medium:

"...Glass has a molten state in which it can be blown into the most beautiful of shapes… If a material is worked in its most simple and befitting manner, the results obtained are more beautiful than those which are arrived at by any roundabout method of production."

SOLD

James McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903)

The Doorway, 1879-80

signed with the butterfly and inscribed 'imp.' in pencil to margin

etching and drypoint; printed in dark brown/warm black ink on laid paper, trimmed at the platemark leaving a signature tab; an impression in the ninth state (of twenty); published by The Fine Art Society in Venice, a Series of Twelve Etchings (the ‘First Venice Set’), 1880, no. 5

11 1/2 x 8 inches       29.5 x 20.5 cm

PROVENANCE

P. & D. Colnaghi & Co, London; Thomas Neilson Brown; The Fine Art Society, London, 2007; private collection, England

EXHIBITED

The Fine Art Society, J. McNeill Whistler: Venice, etchings in drypoint, London, 1880 (cat. no. 5, a different impression); Universal Exhibition, Paris, 1889 (cat. no. 419, a different impression); International Exhibition, Glasgow Art Galleries, Glasgow, 1901 (cat. no. 225, a different impression); The Fine Art Society, James McNeill Whistler: The Embroidered Curtain, London, 2007, no. 24 (this impression)

LITERATURE

F. Wedmore, Whistler's Etchings: a Study and a Catalogue (London 1886), no. 154; H. Mansfield, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-Points of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (Chicago 1909), no. 185; E.G. Kennedy, The Etched Work of Whistler (New York 1910), no. 188; M. F. MacDonald, G. Petri, M. Hausberg, and J. Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, (Glasgow 2011), on-line website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk, no. 193

William Heath Wilson (1849 – 1927)

A View of Florence from Monte Alle Croci, 1874

signed and dated 1874

oil on canvas

12 1/2  x 21 3/4 inches       32 x 55 cm

PROVENANCE

The collection of Antonio Paolucci, Italian art historian and curator, Director, Vatican Museums, 2007-2017

This view is likely taken from the grounds of the 15th century Renaissance church of San Salvatore and the neighbouring Franciscan convent which looks down onto the centre of Florence. The church of Santa Maria Novella is seen in the distance. The hill of Monte alle Croci is the most famous of Colli Fiorentini, the gentle hills that surrounds Florence and it is the site of some of the city’s most admired monuments. 

Christopher Dresser (1834 – 1904)

A Gentleman's Wardrobe, c.1872

maker unknown

pine with stencilled decoration and brass fittings

81 x 47 x 24 inches       206 x 120 x 61 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, London

Decorated with gently satirical stencilled motifs that reflect a gentleman's grooming routine, this handsome wardrobe is the work of Christopher Dresser, one of the most influential British designers of the second half of the 19th century. Dating from what is thought to be a unique commission from about 1870, the wardrobe is one of four pieces from the same bedroom suite that still exist: this wardrobe, the bedside cabinet (ex-collection John Scott, exhibited at The Fine Art Society, 2014), a dressing table/washstand and a tall, slim cabinet. 

The strict, almost severe design of the wardrobe, coupled with the highly idiosyncratic stencilled decoration are all consistent with Dresser's work at this early period. Dresser's semi-abstracted depiction of both the 'Pinks' (small carnations), and the witty rooster heads with their red cockscombs, convey dandyism and refined preening. The two larger stencils on the wardrobe doors have also been realised in Dresser's unique amalgam of botany and zoomorphism. This fusion of animalia and vegetation can also be seen in designs illustrated in his books, The Art of Decorative Design (1862), and Studies In Design (1876).

John Moyr Smith (1839 – 1912)

Ebonised Cabinet, 1870s

for Collinson & Lock (maker)

ebonised carved wood with mirrors and brass handles

66 x 54 x 17 inches       167 x 137 x 43 cm

EXHIBITED

Private collection, London

LITERATURE

A. Stapleton, John Moyr Smith, 1839-1912: a Victorian designer (Shepton Beauchamp 2002) 

C. Edwards, Collinson & Lock, Art Furnishers, Interior Decorators and Designers 1870 - 1900 (Market Harborough 2022)

The Scottish architect and designer, John Moyr Smith studied at Glasgow School of Art. After leaving his studies he worked on Stirling's Library, Glasgow before moving to Manchester in 1864 as assistant to the Gothicist Alfred Darbyshire. In 1866 he moved again to London to be assistant to George Gilbert Scott. The following year he was on 'temporary service' for Christopher Dresser and was supplying designs for the Silver Studio. However, it wasn’t long until he had his own extensive commercial practice in the decorative arts and became well-known for the design of ceramic tiles – his clients included Minton - which he often incorporated in his furniture.

The Greco-Egyptian style cabinet here bears comparison to another piece of ebonised furniture designed by Moyr Smith for Collinson & Lock's display at the 1872 International Exhibition in London. Though the exhibition piece is larger and more elaborate – the decoration is picked out in gold leaf - both have carved ‘bird-in-flight’ finals on the upper section, a detail that relates to other pieces of furniture designed by Moyr Smith. Twenty years his senior, the innovative and pioneering architect, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson was a great influence on the younger designer; he became a member of Thomson's circle, which included William Leiper, Bruce Talbert, and Daniel Cottier. Moyr Smith extends the Egyptian theme further in the cabinet door panels in the finely incised sphinx. 

Macneil MacLeay ARSA (1806 – 1883)

Stormy Sunrise on Loch Etive — Ben Cruachan in the Distance, 1862

signed and dated 1862

oil on canvas

23 x 39 1/4 inches       58 x 100 cm

EXHIBITED

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1863, no. 248

Rooted in the Romantic tradition, MacLeay’s landscapes prioritised atmospheric conditions over topographical accuracy. Having said that, on the right of the composition sits the clearly identifiable Munro of Ben Cruachan, the highest mountain in Argyll at 3,694 feet, bathed in early morning sun. The turbulent skies and scudding clouds convey mood and emotion. Man’s place, denoted in the incidental croft and curl of smoke, is subordinate to Nature. In this respect he was very similar to his contemporary Horatio McCulloch. 

Macleay was born in Oban, the younger brother of the painter Kenneth Macleay. He began exhibiting with the Dilettanti Society in Glasgow in 1828 and appears to have moved to Edinburgh the following year; from 1848 he was living in Stirling. In 1837 (and possibly again later) he visited northern Europe. A prolific artist, Macleay exhibited his work at the Royal Scottish Academy every year from 1829 to 1878 with only one exception.

Sir john Tenniel RI (1820 – 1914)

Sketch for The Great Industrial Meeting of All Nations, 1851

dated 1851

oil on canvas

11  x 20 inches       28 x 51 cm

PROVENANCE

The Fine Art Society, London, 1895; private collection; Charles and Lavinia Handley-Read; The Fine Art Society, 

London, 1974; private collection, 1979

EXHIBITED

Royal Academy, London, 1851, no. 383; The Fine Art Society, London, 1895; Royal Academy, Victorian and Edwardian 

decorative art, the Handley-Read Collection, London, 1972, no. A48; The Fine Art Society, The Handley-Read Collection; 

the Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, London, 1974, no. 88

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 – 1852)

Circular library table, c.1834

for Edward Hull (fl. 1834 - circa 1847) (attributed maker)

rosewood with original stamped leather top

30  x 59 inches       76 x 150 cm

PROVENANCE

Possibly ‘Hamilton’; Rendell’s, Ashburton, 1984; H. Blairman & Sons; John Scott (1935-2020); the Executors of John Scott

EXHIBITED

The Fine Art Society, The John Scott Collection: Architect-Designers from Pugin to Voysey, London, 3-25 June 2015, no. 2

LITERATURE

A. W. N. Pugin, Gothic Furniture of the 15th century design and etched by A. W. N. Pugin (London 1835), pl. 12, for an ‘Octagon table’ with the same base; C. Gere and M. Whiteway, Nineteenth-Century Design: From Pugin to Mackintosh (London 1993), pg. 21, pl. 15; P. Atterbury and C. Wainwright (eds), Pugin: A Gothic Passion (New Haven and London 1994), pp. 132-33, pl. 235; The John Scott Collection: Architect-Designers from Pugin to Voysey (Volume Eight), The Fine Art Society, 2015, pg. 13, no. 2

William Kidd HRSA (1796 - 1863)

The Spoils of the Day, 1827

signed and dated 1827

oil on canvas

22 1/2 x 29 inches       57 x 74 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Devon, since at least 1975

EXHIBITED

Possibly Royal Academy, London, 1827, as Sportsmen Regaling, no. 20

LITERATURE

T. A. Tompkins, The Jolly Beggar: William Kidd, Scottish Genre Artist 1796-1863 (2013)

Kidd’s pictures are filled with empathy and familiarity. The models could well be portraits of people known to him, and the animation and theatrics of his scenes fill his pictures with humour and pathos. Although he was a prolific and accomplished artist he lived in continual poverty. The diaries of his childhood friend, the artist David Roberts, speak to this continued plight, with entries of "Poor William Kidd, five pounds" throughout.

Sir David Wilkie RA HRSA (1785 – 1841)

Exterior of a Farmhouse with a Pump and Poultry, c.1815-16

oil on panel

8 1/4 x 12 inches       21 x 30.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Probably lot 629 in the sale of Wilkie's work and effects, 30th April 1842; private collection, Scotland, since before 1985

EXHIBITED

Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews and Aberdeen Art Gallery, Sir David Wilkie, Sketches and Studies. 

A Bicentenary Exhibition, 1985, no. 34

LITERATURE

C. Johnston, Sir David Wilkie, Sketches and Studies. A Bicentenary Exhibition (St Andrews, 1985), pg. 40-1, no. 34

Sir Henry Raeburn RA (1756 – 1823)

Portrait of Reverend John Home (1722-1808)

oil on canvas

30 x 25 1/2 inches       76 x 69 cm

PROVENANCE

The sitter's family, and thence by descent

The Reverend John Home is best known as the author of the tragic play, Douglas. Until the Second World War it was a standard Scottish school text, but it is now mainly forgotten. Educated at Leith Grammar School, Home then attended the University of Edinburgh and subsequently studied divinity. A brief foray, indulging an earlier interest in being a soldier, led Home to volunteer against Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. A year later he was minister at the parish of Athelstaneford, East Lothian. He visited nearby Edinburgh often and had friendships with some of the leading Enlightenment figures of the day, such as his distant cousin, David Hume, as well as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and William Robertson.

Home also wrote plays. His first, Agis, was completed in 1747. He took it to London to show to David Garrick, but it was rejected. Five years later, he completed Douglas and again took it to London for Garrick's opinion, but it too was rejected. On his return to Edinburgh his friends determined that it should be produced, and it was performed in 1756 with great success. David Hume summed up his admiration by supposedly saying that his friend possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare," Samuel Johnson, however, declared that there were not ten good lines in the whole play. 

In 1758, after leaving the ministry, Home became private secretary to Lord Bute, then secretary of state, and was appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales, the future George III. He became MP for Edinburgh in 1763 and, in 1778, Home joined a regiment formed by the Duke of Buccleuch. He went on to become one of the founding members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A further portrait of Home by Raeburn is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and he is among the sixteen writers and poets depicted on a frieze that encircles the Scott Monument, Edinburgh.

SOLD