Herbert Sidney Percy

The Poppy Garden

Sir William Blake Richmond KCB, RA, PPRBSA 1842 - 1921 The Shepherd Egg tempera on wooden panel, signed with initials bottom left Image size: 8 ¼ x 5 ½ inches Period gilt oak frame A newly discovered work by the artist. Sir William Blake Richmond KCB, RA, PPRBSA was an English portrait painter, sculptor and a designer of stained glass and mosaic. He is best known for his portrait work and decorative mosaics in St Paul's Cathedral in London. He was the son of the portraitist George Richmond RA and studied at the Royal Academy Schools in the early 1860s. Influenced by his father and by Sir John Everett Millais, he is best known for his mosaic decorations below the dome and in the apse of St Paul's Cathedral in London. His father, George Richmond, was one of 'the Ancients' who were a group of artists who formed around the visionary artist and poet William Blake. Samuel Palmer was an other of the ancients and a close friend of the family. Our painting could have been inspired by George Richmond’s engraving 'The Shepherd', 1827, but in our panel the shepherd is turned round facing away, and is playing a flute instead of resting on a staff. But the sheep and other elements are there. It is also suggestive of Welby Sherman's engraving after Samuel Palmer of the same name and date, but here the shepherd is sitting but like ours turned away. William Blake's is an altogether happier image given the figure is playing to his sheep. Our painting is playing with some of the same ideas and feels like the same sort of period, and the ‘fresco’ like chalk ground is interesting, as is the pen and ink finishing on the tempera. All three are strongly influenced by Blake's illustrations to Thornton's 'Virgil'. The shepherd and his flock are clearly based on Thenot and his sheep in the Frontispiece to Thornton. Blake Richmond wrote:"If there be the least value in my pictures, it is due to such lovely early impressions derived from the sweet poetic work of many of my father's contemporaries, Calvert, Blake and others, whose shadows are substance still to me" [Sir William Blake Richmond, letter to his father, 50 years after the death of William Blake, from Stirling op. cit p. 28]. Richmond was given private art lessons by John Ruskin before attending the Royal Academy for three years. After that he spent a number of years in Italy, where an encounter with a shepherd called Beppino, 'a splendid speciman of a Sabine Shepherd', could also have gave him the inspiration for the painting we show here. Richmond recalls how he met Beppino on the hillside, and was invited to share the shade of the shepherd's capanna, a wooden hut. 'What a place! In an instant of time I was back into the age of kings, and I knew Romulus had lived and am sure that he lived in a hut exactly like this one'. That night Richmond dined at Beppino's hut 'on roast kid, hard bread dipped in Roman wine, goat's cream and white ricotta'. The shepherd had such an impression on Richmond that he sought him out on a return visit to Italy some years later, but was saddened to hear that Beppino 'had joined his fore-fathers in the shades'. He was moved to write the following, which perfectly expresses the mood of this painting and his tribute to a fleeting companion: 'Little events of this kind unite past times with present, create and emphasis continuity of human instincts, which seem to defy time and make travel so intensely interesting and invigorating to a citizen of this world. One need not go to the palace, far otherwise, or to cities and towns to discover the kernal of enduring civilisations. One finds it, if one wills to do so, in the backbone of the world, an ancient peasantry who have watched and still watch the progress of the stars'. Richmond was influential in the early stages of the Arts and Crafts Movement in his selection of bold colours and materials for the mosaics in St. Paul's Cathedral and in his collaboration with James Powell and Sons...

Attributed to Mary Adshead 1904 - 1995 London Costmongers Oil on canvas Image size: 30 x 36 inches Framed Costermongers were London people that sold fruit and veg and other ‘perishables’ from barrows. Often wheeling and then stationing their barrow on the street, so their customers could easily come and buy from them. Costermongers were fiercely independent, rebellious in their dress and outlook, and had little time for ‘middle class moralising’ and attempts to suppress or restrict their way of life. (Much like modern teenagers) The men depicted stop work for a break with cups of tea and a few read the newspapers. Next to the man with the yellow apron can be seen some cakes on a plate. A work place , a factory can be seen in the distance on the right. It is possible that the painting depicts a cabmen's shelter, as some did serve outside and many still survive today in London. The style of the painting is very much that of a student of the Slade School in London and has similarities with other artists work such as James Batemen or Herbert Ashwin Budd. On the back of the painting it has in chalk the name 'Rhoades', which could refer to the artist Geoffrey Hamilton Rhoades...

Signed and dated 92 lower left. Oil on canvas. Frank Bramley British, 1857-1915 Frank Bramley is considered one of the most important artists of the Newlyn School, the group of artists who settled in Newlyn, Cornwall during the 1880s and 1890s, drawn by the light, lifestyle and the example of Alexander Stanhope Forbes, and were at the forefront of 'British Impressionism'. He was particularly ‘in the news’ when his painting of a woman reading in a garden made the astonishing price of $590,000 at Sotheby's New York in late May 1996. As the seminal catalogue of the famous Newlyn School exhibition states, Bramley's reputation has rested for some time on Hopeless Dawn, his major RA exhibition of 1888, and which in recent years has been hung almost constantly at the Tate Gallery. Bramley was born in Lincolnshire and trained at Lincoln Art School, later at Verlat's Academy in Antwerp, from where he went to Venice in 1882-83, where our painting was executed. He first showed at the Royal Academy in London in 1884 (both paintings were Venetian scenes), and it was in the winter of 1884/5 that Bramley settled in Newlyn. He was a quiet and reserved figure, prone to bouts of melancholy. He worked on his own in a tiny studio in an old thatched cottage - the cottage consisted of two rooms, one at ground level (which was the studio) and one which was below ground which was inhabited by a woman who'd lost her arms and who managed to look after a set of tiny children as well as a small potato and turnip shop. Bramley moved to a purpose-built glass studio in 1889. He is known as the master of the so-called 'square-brush technique' which characterizes much of the best Newlyn School work and he used this until 1893, later than most of his colleagues. Bramley was friendly with the great artist Sargent and with him was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1894, being elected a full member in 1911. In 1891 he had married, and 4 years later they moved to the Midlands where his work became less socially orientated and more purely decorative. His last years were spent in a London flat...

Edward Charles Barnes, a distinguished London painter active during the Victorian era, is celebrated for his evocative domestic scenes and interiors, particularly those featuring wom...