George Victor Du Noyer (1817-1869) Watercolours of Ireland’...

Hammer

€16,000

George Victor Du Noyer (1817-1869)

Watercolours of Ireland’s Geological Landscapes

This folio of ten large watercolour drawings by George Victor Du Noyer provides an insight into the work of a remarkable artist, who devoted his life to the advancement of science and art in nineteenth-century Ireland. Born in Dublin in 1817, of French Huguenot descent, Du Noyer was a prolific watercolourist, geologist and antiquarian. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced thousands of drawings documenting the landscapes, geological formations, antiquities and general life of the towns and countryside of Ireland. Du Noyer’s employment with the Ordnance Survey began when, aged seventeen, he was apprenticed to George Petrie, head of the Topographical section. In 1848 he was appointed assistant at the Geological Survey of Ireland, working under Thomas Oldham. The expansion of the railway network in Ireland during these years resulted in cuttings being made through rock, exposing valuable geological information. Du Noyer made drawings of many of these cuttings, then spent the next two decades traversing the Irish countryside as a geological surveyor, working mainly in counties Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Kerry, as well as Co. Antrim, Down and Armagh. Between 1841 and 1863, he exhibited forty-eight paintings at the RHA, as well as contributing illustrations to all's "Ireland" and Joseph Portlock's Geological Report on Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh. His drawings were also used to illustrate Roderick Impey Murchison's Siluria, Joseph Beete Juke's Popular Geology and other publications. Du Noyer’s Huguenot roots were important to him, and in 1858, aged forty-one, he married Frances Adélaide Du Bédat. They had five children, the youngest being Henry Westropp. In 1867 he became the first District Surveyor of the Geological Survey, moving to Carrigfergus, Co. Antrim. However, while surveying he contracted scarlet fever, and died on 3rd January 1869, just one day after his daughter Fanny had died of the same disease. They were both buried in the graveyard adjoining All Saint's Parish Church, in Co. Antrim. After his death, his widow offered his collection of drawings, contained in twelve volumes, to the Royal Irish Academy, where they remain today. The other main collection of his work is held by the Geological Survey of Ireland, with the result that works by Du Noyer are comparatively rare on the open market.

The first watercolour in the Fonsie Mealys' folio, Ancient River Course at Bagnelstown, is inscribed on verso “Ancient River course in granite near Bagnelstown, Co. Carlow. View of the site of great waterfall, looking up the gully.”  Although signed and dated March 1857, it relates to a group of similar sketches (now in the Geological Survey of Ireland collection), made in September 1848 when George Du Noyer was in the Bagnelstown area. As with many of his landscape drawings, it includes figures of surveyors at work, examining and measuring the rocks. Another watercolour in the Fonsie Mealys' folio,Tilted Slabs, depicts large inclined slabs of stone in a coastal landscape, and is dated December 1857. The location is not identified but may be the Old Red Sandstone quarries at Carnivan Head in Co. Wexford. In Columnar Basalt, a third drawing in the folio, du Noyer, with characteristic brio, depicts a rowing boat braving the waves on the coastline of Co. Antrim. Visible in the foreground, battered by the seas, are hexagonal basalt formations, similar to those at the nearby Giant’s Causeway. The date of this watercolour is almost certainly 1857, when du Noyer visited the Giant’s Causeway in preparation for writing an article, which was duly published three years later, in The Geologist journal. A related drawing in the Fonsie Mealys' folio, Dunluce, is dated August 1857, and depicts what is likely the same rowing boat, beneath the cliffs near Dunluce, in Co. Antrim. The soft chalk cliffs have been eroded by the sea, but the columns of harder basalt stone stand proud. Granite River Bed depicts two surveyors working in an area of complex geology. Visible on the right hand side is a section of granite rock that still bears the marks of having been, as Du Noyer notes in an inscription on the verso, ‘rounded and furrowed’ by the action of running water. Beyond is a valley strewn with large boulders. As the new railway extended north from Dublin towards Belfast, du Noyer followed the line of the track, sketching newly-exposed walls of stone. A watercolour in the Fonsie Mealys' folio, Dundalk and Enniskillen Railway Cutting, with the railway line in the foreground, also includes a self-portrait of the artist, holding a drawing book. This relates to a similar drawing of a cutting on the same line, Trapped Dyke, which was reproduced in Beete Jukes’ 1853 Popular Physical Geology. Another important geological location north of Dublin can be found on the coastal cliffs of Loughshinny, between Skerries and Rush. The dramatic folded layers at Loughshinny are depicted by du Noyer with great accuracy in a watercolour which is a finished version of his woodcut illustration in Beete Jukes’ 1862 The Student’s Manual of Geology. Signed and dated 1857, the watercolour Dingle Harbour Cliffs shows dramatic cliffs, with vertical strata. The view is probably taken looking south from near Ferriter’s Cove, over fossil-bearing rocks of the Silurian period. Another Du Noyer watercolour of the Dingle Peninsula, Dingle Promontory, depicts a geological formation known as ‘The Acadian Unconformity’, where horizontal Middle Devonian rocks overlie older, Lower Devonian strata. Also visible is the sea stack known as “An Searrach” near Kinard Beach. This watercolour probably also dates to 1857. 
As a portfolio, w.a.f. (10)

Dr. Peter Murray, 2022