Thomas Roberts (1748-1777) A Landstorm with a Ruined Bridge ...

Estimate

€30,000 - €50,000

Thomas Roberts (1748-1777) A Landstorm with a Ruined Bridge and River in Spate Oil on canvas 42 x 62cm (16 ½ x 24 ½”) Provenance: With The Godolphin Gallery, Dublin; with Solomon Gallery, Dublin; with Grace Pym Gallery, May 1984 where purchased by the Hon. Francis D. Murnaghan Jr., thence by descent. Exhibited: Possibly Society of Artists in Ireland 1769, no.62; Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland ‘James Arthur O’Connor’ Nov/Dec 1985, no.7, p.40 (ill.); Belfast, Ulster Museum Feb/Mar 1986; Cork, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Mar/Apr 1986; Boston, McMullen Museum of Art ‘ÉIRE/LAND’, 2003, no.21. Literature: Hutchinson, John, ‘James Arthur O’Connor’ NGI 1985, p.40 (ill); Breeze, George (ed) ‘Society of Artists in Ireland 1765-80, p.47 (ill); Kreilkamp, V. (ed), Exhibition catalogue – ‘ÉIRE/LAND’, Boston 2003; Laffan, William & Rooney, Brendan, ‘Thomas Roberts – Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth Century Ireland’, Churchill House Press, 2009, no.7, p.325 (ill). Storm scenes were something of a staple among Roberts’s contemporaries, the sub-genre ultimately owing its popularity to the art of Gaspard Dughet. In the Society of Artists in Dublin, Robert Carver and James Forrester had both exhibited works entitled Landstorm while, in 1769, the Dublin public had the opportunity to compare works in the genre by Roberts and two of his teachers, James Mannin and George Mullins. It has been plausibly suggested (Breeze, op. cit.) that Roberts’s 1769 exhibit, entitled Landstorm with a Waterfall, is identifiable with the present work. A river in spate flows through a bridge, one of the arches of which has been broken by the flood. Beneath a distinctly classical structure, itself ruined and overgrown, two figures in blue and red strike dramatic poses. The landscape is unusual within Roberts’s oeuvre in introducing a tragic note in these travellers who rail against the elements, rather than merely struggle through them. If this dating is correct, the painting coincides with Roberts’s breakthrough 1769 showing at the William Street exhibition room. In this year he moved from his master, Mullins’s, tavern, The Horseshoe and Magpie, in Temple Bar, to his own lodgings off Dame Street. Other exhibits that year included his masterpiece, the Frost Piece, and his View of Rathfarnham Castle. This is one of a series of storm scenes painted by Roberts, including A Sea Storm (National Gallery of Ireland), probably the picture he exhibited in Dublin in 1771 and something of an imitation of the style of Vernet, who had been patronised by at least three of Roberts’s Irish patrons, the Earls of Leeson and Charlemont, and Richard Dawson, and, in the mid-1770s, a series of variations on the ‘landstorm with travellers’ theme, initiated in one of the upright landscape he painted for Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn’s town house in St James’s Square. Here in the insignificant powerlessness of man in the face of the hostile forces of natures, Roberts touches, more closely than usual, on theories of the Sublime as articulated by Edmund Burke (1729-97) or David Hartley (1705-57): ‘If there be a precipice, a cataract, a mountain .. in one part of the scene, the nascent ideas of fear and horror may magnify and enliven all the other ideas, and by degrees pass into pleasures, by suggesting the security from pain’. This, more romantic, approach to landscape painting was to be the element in Roberts’s art that his brother Sautelle would take further. We are grateful to William Laffan and Brendan Rooney for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.