Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

Pen, ink and wash Framed dimensions: 13 x 11 ¼ inches Drawn c.1765 Verso: a study of a hanged man Mortimer has filled this small sheet with action, depicting in the top right, Apollo and Artemis...

Pen, ink and wash Framed dimensions: 9 ½ x 11 ¼ inches Drawn c. 1763 This small, powerful study shows St Jerome contemplating the bible with a cross and sk...

Pencil on paper Signed 'G.L. Brockhurst’ (lower right) Drawn c.1920 Collections: The Fine Art Society, London, 1981; Mr & Mrs Alan Fortunoff, acquired from the above; Private col...

Pastel on paper, oval 9 x 7 ¼ inches; 230 x 185 mm Inscribed on the verso: ‘The Revd Henry Dabzac D.D./ late Senior Fellow of/ Trinity College Dublin/ ever to be lamented by all that knew/ Him. Extensive learning, zeal, gently tempered/ by a spirit of charity & above all, a strong/ faith & a piety deservedly gained/ the character of a great and good man./ This exceptional man died 12th May 1790/ This picture was his give to Jane [Mary] Crofton, his sincerely [missing] sister.’ Collections: Rev. Dr Henry Dabzac gift to his sister, Jane Crofton (d.1797); Sir Hugh Crofton (1763-1834); By descent to 1990; Private collection, Dorset to 2020. Literature: Robert Staveley, Traces of Past and Present, Dublin, 1895, p.74; Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800, online edition, no.J3751247 This characteristic pastel portrait by Hugh Douglas Hamilton was made early in his career; it depicts precisely the kind of education, well-connected Irish sitter who fuelled his success. The Reverend Henry Dabzac was from a distinguished Huguenot family, a celebrated academic historian, Dabzac received the Donegall lectureship in 1764 and from 1785 was Librarian and Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. According to his earliest biographer, Hamilton was the son of a peruke-maker based in Crow Street, Dublin. As Anne Hodge has pointed out, this places Hamilton’s father at the heart of the city: Crow street was a narrow thoroughfare formed part of the busy warren of streets bordered by the old Houses of Parliament and Trinity College at one end, and by Dublin Castle at the other. It is perhaps telling that in this early portrait, Hamilton shows Dabzac in a splendid powdered wig and his clerical bands. In 1754 Hamilton was apprenticed to James Mannin, a ‘pattern drawer’ who two years later was appointed master of the school of ornament at the Dublin Society’s drawing school, run by Robert West. Here Hamilton took the first prize in the 1755 competition, winning a premium of £1/16/. Hamilton developed a popular and profitable method of making pastel likenesses of sitters in a distinctive oval format. Hamilton developed a technique of using a sharpened pastel to hatch shaded areas of the features and, in the case of this portrait of Dabzac, the white powdered wig, which is drawn with particular care. In 1764 Hamilton moved to London where this small, oval pastels proved...

Collections: Sir Thomas Lawrence, who acquired the contents of Fuseli’s studio; Susan, Countess of Guilford, née Coutts (1771-1837), acquired from the Lawrence estate; Susan, Baroness North (1797-1884), daughter of the above; Mrs A. M. Jaffé, acquired in France, c. 1950 to 2016. Black chalks, on buff-coloured paper Stamped verso: ‘Baroness Norths Collection / of Drawings by H Fuseli Esq.’ Framed dimensions: 26.38 x 20.63 inches This boldly drawn sheet depicting a seated figure was made by Fuseli at an important and highly productive moment in his career. The monumental drawing is closely related to another sheet by Fuseli in the British Museum which Schiff published as subject unknown. Both drawings were made when Fuseli was designing his most important sequence of historical works, including scenes from Shakespeare and Milton, The Nightmare and The Death of Dido which was exhibited at the Royal Academy to great critical acclaim in 1781. The present drawing does not relate directly to any of Fuseli’s finished historical paintings of the period, but evidently the image of a slightly menacing, seated and covered old woman was precisely the sort of motif he was playing with. It is notable that the same figure reappears later in Fuseli’s work as the witch from Ben Jonson’s Witch’s Song which Fuseli produced as both a painting and engraving in 1812. Fuseli returned to London in 1779 from a highly creative and productive period in Rome and established himself as one of the leading history painters of the period. Fuseli re-established contact with his old mentor Sir Joshua Reynolds, becoming a regular guest at his dinner table and visitor to his studio. The earliest and most striking manifestation of this strategy was Fuseli's Death of Dido, exhibited in 1781 at the Royal Academy. Executed on the same scale as Reynolds's version (Royal Collection), Fuseli's vertically oriented picture was hung directly opposite Reynolds's with its horizontal orientation, inevitably inviting comparison between the two works and garnering Fuseli much publicity and favourable reviews in the newspapers. The present, previously unpublished sheet, relates closely to a drawing now in the British Museum. That sheet shows the same seated old woman, drawn on a smaller scale and more schematic in design, seated next to an anatomical drawing of a man. The pose of this figure is related to the pose of Dido in his Death of Dido; the foreshortened torso, arrangement of head, oblique view of Dido’s features and arms all suggest that the study can be viewed as an initial thought for the composition. Fuseli may have initially thought of including the figure of the hunched and covered old woman. Drawn on identical paper to the British Museum sheet, our study is an enlarged depiction of the same figure, more elaborately delineated and developed. The presence of a chain to the right of the figure, suggests that the iconography was related in some way to a scene of imprisonment. Fuseli had first explored the motif of the hooded old woman in an early Roman drawing, 'The Venus Seller'. The idea of a grotesque old woman, hooded and with angular nose and projecting chin seen in profile was most spectacularly used by Fuseli in his sequence of paintings depicting The Three Witches from Macbeth. Fuseli seems to have kept the present sheet and may have returned to it when preparing a painting of The Witch and the Mandrake from Ben Jonson’s Witch’s Song from his Masque of Queens in 1812. Here the same seated figure looks out from under her hood and picks a mandrake by moonlight. Jonson’s drama had been performed at the court of James I in 1609, inspired the subject. To throw the nobility of the queens into relief, the poet added a coven of witches, one of whom declares: ‘I last night lay all alone, On the ground, to hear the mandrake groan; And plucked him up, though he grew full low, And, as I had done, the cock did crow.’ The figure was reversed in the associated etching which was published in 1812. It seems likely that the present drawing remained as part of Fuseli’s working archive of figure studies. The present drawing was presumably purchased with the bulk of Fuseli’s drawings after the artist’s death by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Lawrence’s large group of Fuseli drawings were then acquired by Susan, Countess of Guildford (1771-1837). Lady Guildford was the eldest daughter of the banker Thomas Coutts (1735-1822), who himself had supported Fuseli’s journey to Rome in the 1770s and had remained one of the artist’s key...

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...

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: J. Goodfriend, USA. Brown wash and pencil on laid paper Framed dimensions: 13.25 x 11.75 inches This powerful drawing was made at the time that Romney was painting the famous group portrait of the Gower Children now in Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal. Romney was a bold and incisive draughtsman who made numerous rich brown ink studies, principally for historical compositions; by contrast, comparatively few studies linked directly to his portraits survive. The existence of a group of studies for the Gower Children underscores its importance to Romney. The sitters were the five youngest of the eight children of Granville, 2nd Earl Gower who, at the time the portrait was commissioned, was President of the Council in Lord North’s government and one of the best-connected and most influential people in England. The present drawing which is a large scale treatment of the composition in its final form perfectly distils Romney’s conceit: the younger children dancing whilst their elder sister, in the guise of a Bacchante plays the tambourine. The bold and dramatic study underlines both the artistic confidence and classical grandeur Romney gained during his trip to Italy between 1773 and 1775. The commission from Granville, 2nd Earl Gower to paint five of his children came shortly after Romney’s Continental tour. The initial idea, as represented by the present drawing, seems to have been to paint Lady Anne, the figure on the right of the composition playing the tambourine, who was the youngest of Gower’s first four children by his second wife Lady Louisa Egerton and who married the Rev. Edward Vernon Harcourt, later Archbishop of York, with three of her younger half-siblings by Gower’s third wife, Lady Susanna Stewart: at the left Lady Georgina, who became Countess of St Germans following her marriage to the Hon. William Eliot; at the right Lady Charlotte Sophia, later Duchess of Beaufort and in the centre Lady Susanna, later Countess of Harrowby. Romney added a fifth child to the finished portrait, Gower’s son: Lord Granville, later created Viscount Granville and Earl Granville. In Italy Romney had produced a large number of studies of classical antiquities and old master paintings. The commission from Gower offered Romney the opportunity to explore a complex multi-figural group, putting into practice the kind of ambitious classical quotations that Reynolds was currently exploiting. In 1773 Reynolds had completed the remarkable group portrait of the Montgomery Sisters, now in the Tate Gallery, London, which showed them adorning a herm of the Roman god Hymen; the composition used a garland to link the three figures who were shown in classical costume dancing at the foot of a Roman sculpture. Scholars have long pointed to a similar sources for the two compositions: the works of Nicolas Poussin. Whilst the Montgomery Sisters is based, in part, on a Bacchanal now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Gower Children has always been associated with Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time, now in the Wallace Collection, London. It seems more likely that Romney was looking to an antique source in the form of the Borghese Dancers, a Roman relief, then in Palazzo Borghese in Rome. Romney would have seen the relief of interlocking, dancing maidens and would also have known Guido Reni’s Aurora...

Collections: Henry Scipio Reitlinger (1882-1950); Private collection, UK to 2019 Framed dimensions: 14.50 x 15.38 inches This drawing is one of only two known portrait drawings by Romney (as opposed to preliminary studies for portraits) and is dated by Alex Kidson as being executed no later than 1769. It is likely that the present drawing was originally part of a sketchbook, now largely dismembered (Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal), which Kidson notes, contained some of Romney’s most beautiful early drawings. This drawing, and a second sheet formerly with Andrew Wyld, have been identifying as depicting the Rev. William Atkinson...

Collections: Russell sale, Christie’s, 14 February, 1807: ‘John Russell, Esq., R.A. deceased, crayon painter to His Majesty, the Prince of Wales, and Duke of York; and brought from his late Dwelling in Newman Street’, lot 92, ‘St Peter’, bt. Thompson (£1.13s); Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 25th September 1980, lot 113; Private collection, UK, 2016. Literature: Martin Postle, 'Patriarchs, prophets and paviours: Reynolds's images of old age', The Burlington Magazine, vol. cxxx, no. 1027, October 1988, pp. 739-40, fig. 9; Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, Cambridge, 1995, p.136, repr.; Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition, J.64.2928. Signed and dated: J Russell/ fecit 1772 (lower right) Framed dimensions: 25 x 31 inches John Russell was admitted to the Royal Academy in March 1770, at the same time as Daniel Gardner. The nascent Academy Schools were still establishing their teaching structures, but central to the syllabus were the twin components of drawing after the antique and from life models. By 1772 Russell had already been awarded a silver medal and progressed to the life academy, where he produced this remarkable pastel study of George White. White was the most famous model employed by the Royal Academy and prominent artists in the second half of the eighteenth century. A paviour – or street mender –by profession White had been discovered by Joshua Reynolds, who in turn introduced him to the Academy. Russell’s striking head study demonstrates his abilities as a portraitist and pastellist, at the same time showing his interest in the Academy’s preoccupation with promoting history painting. George White was one of the most celebrated models in eighteenth-century London. According to the painter Joseph Moser: 'Old George…owed the ease in which he passed his latter days, in a great measure to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who found him exerting himself in the laborious employment of thumping down stones in the street; and observing not only the grand and majestic traits of his countenance, but the dignity of his muscular figure, took him out of a situation to which his strength was by no means equal, clothed, fed, and had him, first as a model in his own painting room, then introduced him as a subject for the students of the Royal Academy.' As Martin Postle has pointed out, whilst characterful studies of old men posed as biblical figures, prophets or saints by Continental old masters were readily available on the art market – Reynolds himself had copied a head of Joab by Federico Bencovich in the collection of his friend and patron, Lord Palmerston - finding a model in Britain from whom to execute a painting was more difficult. White therefore offered a rare opportunity for artists to combine portraiture and history painting, by painting a model in the guise of an historical or literary character. In 1771 Reynolds showed at the Royal Academy a picture of White entitled Resignation. It was engraved in 1772 and accompanied by a stanza from Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, implying a literary context to what is essentially a portrait. In his annotated Royal Academy catalogue, Horace Walpole noted: ‘This was an old beggar, who had so fine a head that Sir Joshua chose him for the father in his picture from Dante, and painted him several times, as did others in imitation of Reynolds. There were even cameos and busts of him.’ White sat to, amongst others Johan Zoffany, John Sanders, Nathaniel Hone and the sculptor John Bacon...

Inscribed by the artist in pen and brown ink, upper margin: 'σοφὴν δὲ μισῶ: μὴ γὰρ ἔν γ' ἐμοῖς δόμοις / εἴη φρονοῦσα πλείον' ἢ γυναῖκα χρή [Euripides, Hippolytus, 11, 640-41: “But a ...

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