We found 1177565 price guide item(s) matching your search
There are 1177565 lots that match your search criteria. Subscribe now to get instant access to the full price guide service.
Click here to subscribe- List
- Grid
-
1177565 item(s)/page
Erskine Nicol RSA ARA (1825-1904) A Shebeen at Donnybrook Oil on canvas, 61 x 87 cm (24 x 34½") Signed and dated 1851, old label verso Exhibited: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1852, no. 74; Cork, Crawford Gallery, Whipping The Herring, May-August 2006 The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, "Ireland, Her People and Landscape", June-September 2013, Cat. No. 37 Literature: "Whipping the Herring" 2006, p116, illustrated p117 "Ireland, Her People and Landscape", illustrated p. 44 Erskine Nicol first visited Ireland from his native Scotland in 1846, the beginning of a longstanding relationship with the country. Travelling through Ireland and especially Connemara, Nicol witnessed the outbreak of the great potato famine which devastated the over-populated West of Ireland causing the death of more than a million people within ten years, with another million forced to emigrate. The artist stayed in Ireland until 1851 when he returned to Scotland, the same year that he painted the present work. Between 1850 and 1869 Nicol exhibited over ninety Irish subjects at the Royal Scottish Academy and over twenty at the Academy in London. After his fourth visit the artist returned for some months every year until ill health prevented him from travelling.. He is better remembered as a genre painter, but as a recorder of an Irish way of life he becomes historically important because there were few artists working in Ireland at that time, a country devastated initially by famine and later by mass evictions forcing mass emigration. Donnybrook Fair attracted numerous artists, including Edward Glew, George Du Noyer, William Brocas and Samuel Watson, who together with Nicol left a legacy of detailed panoramas. The fair was held near Dublin ( now subsumed with in the city), and attracted farmers from all over Ireland to buy and sell livestock. The huge, centuries-old annual gathering incorporated drinking booths, carousels and popular entertainments, and lasted up to two weeks. In the 1860's the authorities finally succeeded in closing the event because of 'revolting scenes of drunkenness and degrading immorality which were enacted every August at Donnybrook. The festival was the site of such predictable drunken violence that the word ' donnybrook' subsequently became synonymous with a 'riotous assembly'. A Shebeen at Donnybrook (shebeen meaning an illegal drinking house) shows more than twenty people in a triangular composition surmounted by a piper. Allusions to fighting are absent; instead there is the type of easy intimacy which authorities equally disliked. The emphasis is on drunkenness, and stereotypically stage Irishmen with red noses loll in the corners. The one on the left adjusts a fiddle, another slouches on the table in the centre, while behind someone shirls a shillelagh to dance, and an old woman smokes a pipe. The image is full of details of farmhouse paraphernalia, the press in the background with its door ajar displaying its contents, as shown previously by Grogan. The raggedness of people's clothes and the way the boy is dressed in tucked- -up skirts reflects Nicols's attention to detail and his familiarity with his subject. The artist was made an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859. Nicol exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Academy and was made an Associate there in 1866. Claudia Kinmonth
Howard Helmick (1845-1907) "The Bibliophile" Oil on canvas, 83 x 67cm (32½ x 26¼") Signed and dated 1871 "This work is untitled but might possibly be a work called "Studying His Almanac" Brought up on a farm in Ohio, Howard Eaton Helmick began his art training in the Ohio Mechanics Institute in Cincinnati, and subsequently at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (from 1862-64). Perhaps he emigrated to avoid becoming a soldier, but two years later he was successfully established in Paris, studying under the guidance of Alexandre Cabanel at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His teacher was accomplished and award winning, and it's easy to see the stylistic influence on this talented pupil, who then showed work at the Paris Salon. Although his initial titles are in French, he soon began exhibiting titles at London's Royal Academy that suggest Irish subjects. Becoming friends with other exiles such as Whistler, he worked from a capacious studio in London's Holland Park, as well as showing titles from addresses in Ireland. He swiftly made a name for himself as an accomplished subject and genre painter, and his many surviving paintings and etchings demonstrate his consistent and undoubted talent. This composition brings to mind accounts by a writer friend of Helmick's, who visited him where he escaped London to paint at lodgings in Kinsale. Hawthorn describes how secretive the artist was about the place that he found so inspiring, just two hours ' by jaunting car' from Cork City in the south west of Ireland. 'Helmick, in his roamings in quest of genre, had discovered it, and every winter afterwards had set up his easel there. The winter climate is deliciously mild, so that you may sit at your open window in your shirt sleeves (as Helmick did to paint and I to write), yet a snow light will fall playfully for a few minutes, to melt as quickly…There is a liquid depth in the atmosphere, mystical and enchanting…Nor are there any other girls so good to be painted,…nor "interiors" more suitable to contain them. Then take the genius of Helmick, and the spell is wrought.' This scene appears unmistakably to be one of his Irish ones. The serving girl wears typical rural Irish attire, with her apron tucked up around her waist in the fashion that was customary for working women, with her white bawneen shawl and her head uncovered showing that she's unmarried. Her pose is reminiscent of other girls painted by Helmick, such as one in 'The Unexpected Visit', which similarly contrasts youth with old age. This scene could be set in the eighteenth century house that Hawthorn describes where the two men lodged 'a hotel, a recent erection, hardly a century old, and adequately equipped, and administered by a landlady and her two daughters…sixteen and seventeen, one slender small and graceful, with thoughtful blue eyes and crowned with silken hair…they would pose for the artist and prattle with the storyteller…'. Although lacking a title on a label, this does seems to be an early Irish work, predating the characteristically Irish titles he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy. The masses of enormous books scattered around the room, the spider legged table and Queen Anne chair, link this with the furnishings in his studies of Irish priests in their well-appointed rooms." Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 59. Claudia Kinmonth 'Howard Eaton Helmick Revisited: Matrimony & Material Culture through Irish Art' in V. Krielkamp ed', Rural Ireland the Inside Story (Exhibition Catalogue, McMillan Art Gallery Boston College, 2012), pp. 89-101. Claudia Kinmonth, September 2013
Cook (Capt. James) and King (Capt. James) A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean undertaken by the Command of his Majesty, for Making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere... Performed under the Direction of Captains Cook, Clerke and Gorse, in ... The Resolution and Discovery, in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780 ..., 1784, Nicol & Cadell, three 4to. vols plus folio atlas volume, 87 maps and plates as called for, folding table, text vols in full calf (worn joints cracked), atlas vol. in half calf (well worn, several maps detached, boards detached)
Almanacks A collection of almanacks for the year 1688, approx 22 works, bound as one, contemporary morocco gilt; Smart (John), Tables of Interest, Discount, Annuities, &c. 1726, 4to., a.e.g., contemporary morocco gilt; Dufferin (Lord), Letters from High Latitudes ..., 1857, frontis, plates, folding table, 3 folding maps, presentation inscription from the author, calf (3)
Chinese Sketches An interesting album of sketches depicting Chinese characters in various occupations, untitled (other than the spine), the uncoloured sketches are believed to be printed, though in parts give the appearance of pen and ink, half roan (worn); ?Persian Manuscript, possibly a commentary, believed to have been obtained in Jeddah, illuminated title page, gilt morocco wallet style binding, (multiple images on-line); His Majesty in Council, Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty`s Service at Sea, [1806], 4to., lacking folding table and wormed, calf (worn) (3)
Muller Freres , Luneville, an Art Nouveau glass table lamp on slender column and round base with domed top Acquired from Riddetts Auctions Bournemouth. Executor sale; From the collection of a Bournemouth connoisseur collected by him and his father over the last 50 years 21½in. (53cm)
Late Regency mahogany dining table telescopic action, the top with well figured mahogany timber and a moulded edge above a plain frieze, raised on turned tapering and reeded legs, headed by stylised carved flowerheads and terminating on casters with four leaves, three later and central leg, circa 1825, 140" fully extended Removed from Ashwick Court, Ashwick, Oak Hill, near Bath for convenience of sale 28 x 55in. (71 x 140cm)
Late 19th Century/early 20th Century satinwood seven drawer ladies dressing table with floral marquetry decoration, on tapered spade feet supports with swing dressing table mirror Removed from Ashwick Court, Ashwick, Oak Hill, near Bath for convenience of sale 21 x 54 x 21in. (53 x 137 x 53cm)
-
1177565 item(s)/page