***WITHDRAWN*** FRANCIS WHEATLEY RA (1747-1801) Travellers ...

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€20,000 - €30,000

***WITHDRAWN*** FRANCIS WHEATLEY RA (1747-1801) Travellers Resting on a Country Road Oil on canvas, 48.5 x 65cm Provenance: Miss Elizabeth Laidlaw, Castleknock, Co. Dublin, circa 1940's and thence by descent; Whytes Auctioneers, Dublin, 25th April 2006 lot no. 103; The Gorry Gallery, An Exhibition of 18th to 20th Century Irish Painting, March 2008, catalogue no. 5 Born in London, the son of a tailor, Francis Wheatley first trained at William Shipley’s academy. He may also have received some instruction from Richard Wilson, to whom Strickland attributes his later excellence in the field of landscape painting.1 At the age of fifteen he was awarded a prize for drawing by the Society of Artists; further prizes followed in 1763, ‘67 and ‘69. During these years he travelled to expand his artistic education. He appears to have first visited Ireland in 1767, for in the records of the Society of Artists for that year it is recorded that a half-share in the premium for views from nature went to “Francis Wheatley in Ireland”.2 His career progressed rapidly. After only a year at the Royal Academy Schools he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Artists, and by 1772 was made Director of that body. At this time his work consisted mostly of small, full-length portraits and conversation pieces in the manner of Johan Zoffany. He also undertook commissions to paint the interiors of certain noblemen’s homes, including Brocket Hall for Lord Melbourne. During these years he developed what was to be his signature style of clear, pale colour handled in a free and sensitive manner. Success however, led to profligacy. He accrued debts and had, in the words of Edward Edwards, “the folly to engage in an intrigue” with the wife of a fellow artist, John Alexander Gresse.3 In 1779 Wheatley fled to Ireland with Mrs Gresse, whom he passed off as his wife. Prior to this deception becoming known, Wheatley received several important portrait commissions in Ireland including The Macartney Family (Art Gallery, Ontario) and The Marquess and Marchioness of Antrim (NGI). He also executed some of the most important large-scale history paintings of his career whilst in Dublin. The best known of these are The Irish House of Commons in 1780 (the only contemporary painting of the interior of the House of Commons) and A View of College Green with the meeting of the Volunteers on the 4th November 1779 (NGI). This last named work was first exhibited at the Society of Artists in William Street, Dublin, in 1880, along with four others by Wheatley – two portraits and two landscapes of Clontarf and Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) respectively. This was to be his only public exhibition in Ireland. In addition to official portraits and history paintings, Wheatley toured Ireland painting delicate watercolour landscapes and studies of the Irish peasantry. Crookshank and Glin note that ”Wheatley’s Irish work is especially interesting for a number of genre subjects in the Wouverman manner of Irish fairs, fisherfolk and gipsy encampments” and comment that they “capture the late eighteenth century Irish scene better than most artists because of their fluency, clarity and gaiety”.4 According to Mary Webster, Wheatley owned a number of drawings by the Dutch master Phillip Wouvermans and was a great admirer of his depictions of travellers and country fairs.5 Both artists evidently empathised with their subjects; in the words of Gandon and Mulvany, Wheatley “succeeded in delineating the characters of the peasantry, in perfect accordance with the humours he met with on these subjects”.6 It was this empathy that led James Kelly to rate Wheatley’s Irish genre scenes as “one of the most rewarding and appealing vistas on to the daily life of the common people of late eighteenth century Ireland”.7 Among Wheatley’s Irish genre scenes are a number of watercolours in the National Gallery of Donnybrook Fair, which were the basis of a large oil of that subject exhibited at the RA in 1784 (no. 91). These share many attributes in common with the present oil, including the artfully arranged groupings of people and animals, the play of light and shade with some groups seen in silhouette from behind, and the use of a narrow device such as a staff or in this case a horse-whip to lead the eye from figure to figure. In Scene at a Fair (reproduced in Webster, op. cit., page 51), a small figure in a travelling cloak is seated in the foreground, echoing the placing of the man with his roughly pinned cloak in the Travellers Resting on a Country Road. In both the watercolours and the present oil Wheatley displays his command of animal painting by depicting horses and donkeys from every conceivable view-point, invariably placing them in such a way as to again direct the eye into the main focal point of the composition. Horses feature in another oil painting, A Gypsy Encampment in Ireland, integrated into the main grouping of figures (Colonel Grant collection, see Webster, page 133). The somewhat malevolent stare of a mongrel dog accosts the viewer, a device that reoccurs in Riot in Broad Street (engraved 1790, fig. 61 in Webster). Wheatley returned to London early in 1784. In that year’s RA exhibition he showed four Irish works. His depictions of Irish fair scenes and country folk proved popular in England, and he continued to produce them long after he returned from Ireland. These Irish peasants also gradually evolved into general rustic ‘types’, which likewise found a ready market among English audiences. Wheatley went on to specialise in this genre, with his Cries of London becoming one of best-selling series of eighteenth century prints. In 1791 he was elected a Royal Academician, but his final years were plagued by gout and debts. 1 Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Vol. II, Maunsel & Co., Dublin, 1913, page 519. The most comprehensive source of information on Wheatley is the monograph on him by Mary Webster, Francis Wheatley, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 1970. 2 Ibid. 3 Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, who have resided or been born in England with critical remarks on their productions, Leigh and Sotheby, London, 1808, quoted by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters 1600-1940, Yale, New Haven and London, 2002, page 164. 4 Ibid., page 166. 5 Webster, op. cit., page 48. 6 James Gandon and T. J. Mulvany, The Life of James Gandon, Esq, quoted in Webster, op. cit., page 48. 7 James Kelly, ‘Francis Wheatley: His Irish Paintings, 1779—83’, in Adele M. Dalsimer (ed.), Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, Faber & Faber, Boston and London, 1993, page 160.