James Miller

18th century view of the Elephant and Castle in London

Circa 1780

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...

THE HON. MARY SHUTTLEWORTH, NÉE COCKBURN (D. 1777) and her sister ANNA MARIA, 9TH BARONESS FORRESTER (D. 1808) Pastel and gouache on paper laid on canvas, on their original backb...

Collections: Commissioned by Andrew Corbett, husband of the sitter; The Venerable Stuart Corbett; Sir Stuart Corbett; By descent to 2002; Sotheby’s, London 21 March 2002, lot.104; Lowell Libson...

Collections: The sitter, and by descent; Christie's, 19th March 1928, lot 6; Private collection to 2019 Literature: G.C. Williamson, John Downman, A.R.A., his Life and Works, Lon...

Collections: With Ellis Smith, London; Private collection, to 2015. Literature: G.C. Williamson, John Downman A.R.A., his Life and Works, p. lviii no...

Collections: Muir Hetherington; Sir John and Lady Witt, acquired 1974; By descent to 2015. Literature: Tom Jones (ed.), William Henry Hunt 1790-1864, exh. cat., 1981, no. 145 (Girl in a bedroom); John Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) Life and Work, London, 1982, no. 553, p. 194, colour pl. 16. Exhibited: Wolverhampton, Central Art Gallery, Preston, Harris Museum and Art Gallery and Hastings, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, William Henry Hunt 1790-1864, 1981, no. 145 as Girl in a bedroom (Lent by Sir John & Lady Witt) Framed dimensions: 20 x 20.75 inches This unusually charming and well-preserved watercolour was painted by William Henry Hunt in around 1833. Almost certainly depicting his young wife, Sarah, possibly in the interior of her family home at Bramley in Hampshire. This work shows Hunt’s remarkable virtuosity as a watercolourist, Hunt, for example, articulates the profile of his young wife, by leaving a reserve of white paper to suggest the light modelling her features. Throughout the 1830s Hunt made a sequence of richly painted interior views of both domestic and agricultural spaces which pay scrupulous attention to detail. Hunt was born in London, the son of a tin-plate worker and japanner. J. L. Roget recorded the observation of Hunt’s uncle: ‘nervy, little Billy Hunt… was always a poor cripple, and as he was fit for nothing, they made an artist of him.’ At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to the landscape painter John Varley for seven years, moving to live with Varley at 18 Broad Street, Golden Square, London. There he made close friends with both John Linnell and William Mulready. Hunt worked at the ‘Monro Academy’, at 8 Adelphi Terrace, London, the house of Dr Thomas Monro, an enthusiastic patron of landscape watercolourists. Through Monro, Hunt was introduced to the 5th Earl of Essex...

The artwork is signed on the lower right. Ivar Albertovitch Puni, known as Jean Pougny, was born in Kuokkala (now Finland, then in the administrative district of St. Petersburg) in...

This large wash drawing is a slightly enlarged version of a composition executed by Hubert Robert in 1761, at the end of his stay in Rome. This composition is a marvellous synthesis of the painter's art: the clatter of the waterfall, in a grandiose setting inspired by antiquity, is opposed to the intimacy of a genre scene, made up of a few peasant women performing some agricultural work. 1. The stay in Italy, an important founding stage in Hubert Robert's carrier Hubert Robert came from a privileged family of Lorraine origin, linked to the Choiseul-Stainville family, where his father was an intendant. The protection of this powerful aristocratic family enabled him to study classical art at the Collège de Navarre (between 1745 and 1751). After a first apprenticeship in the workshop of the sculptor Slodtz (1705 - 1764), he was invited by Etienne-François de Choiseul-Beaupré-Stainville (the future Duke of Choiseul, then Count of Stainville) to join him in Rome when the latter had just been appointed ambassador. Hubert Robert arrived in Rome on 4 November 1754, aged twenty-one, and remained there until 24 July 1765. Thanks to his patron, he obtained a place as a pensioneer at the Académie de France without having won the prestigious Prix de Rome. On his arrival in Rome, he frequented the studio of the painter Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691 - 1765), the inventor of the ruins painting, and also benefited from the proximity of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s studio (1720 - 1778). During his eleven-year stay in Rome, Hubert Robert studied the great Italian masters and drew many of the great archaeological sites, multiplying the sketches which he would use throughout his career, becoming one of the masters of the "ruin landscape". Back in Paris in 1765, he was very successful. He was accepted and admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture on the same day, July 26th 1766, which was very unusual. He was appointed draughtsman of the king's gardens in 1784, then guard of the Royal Museum from 1784 to 1792. Arrested in 1793 and detained in the prisons of Sainte Pélagie and Saint-Lazare, he was released in 1794 after the fall of Robespierre and undertook a second trip to Italy. In 1800, Hubert Robert was appointed curator of the new Central Museum and died at his home in Paris in 1808. 2. Description of the artwork This composition, formerly called "La Cascade du Belvédère Pamphile" , is undoubtedly inspired by the water theatres of the Frascati villas. Hubert Robert presents a hemicycle of columns with rustic bossages at the foot of which is a cascade of water falls into a basin. The hemicycle is flanked by two high walls, pierced by window wells topped with antique masks...

The Hunting Party Attributed to Dirk Maes (1659-1717) Dutch. Figures in a Classical Landscape, Watercolour and wash on paper, Mounted, unframed image 6.75" x 9.75" (17.1 x 24.7cm)...

Grand Tour Study Italian School, 18th century monogrammed, lower right hand corner, Watercolour wash painting on board, glazed frame Framed size: 9 x 11 inches The painting captures...

Artist/ School: French School, 18th century Title: The Roman Ruins at St. Remy de Provence, France. Inscribed verso to the frame: ‘Ruins at Roman Monument...

Provenance: The Marchesi Strozzi, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence Sale, Christie’s, London, May 20, 1993, lot 315, as by Carl Borromaus Andreas Ruthart...