128
124 Andrew Nicholl RHA (1804-1886)
A View of the Long Bridge, Belfast Through A Bank of Poppies
Watercolour, 35 x 53cm (13¾ x 21”)
Signed
€10,000 - 15,000
As Walter Strickland observed, Andrew Nicholl was devoted to art from his boyhood,
and ‘won a reputation as a landscape painter in his native town.’He would later be known
as the most talented, renowned and prolific topographical Irish artist of the nineteenth
century. His training was important. He worked as a talented apprentice at the printing
business of F.D. Finley where he was under the instruction of his elder brother William.
While in London, he spent considerable time at the Dulwich College Gallery, where
he copied paintings on show. He admired the work of J.M.W. Turner. Jeanne Sheehy
has written; ‘Most of his work is interesting, but particularly exciting is the series in
which wildflowers in the foreground form a screen through which we dimly perceive
the landscape. The paintings have a sharpness and naïveté which is totally captivating.’
This series, of which ‘A View of the Long Bridge, Belfast Through a Bank of Poppies,’
is an exemplary case, demonstrates the artist’s talents aptly. He is evidently a master of
the watercolour medium. The work features the fine exactitude of botanical illustration
and combines this with a distant view of Belfast City The eye eagerly explores the frieze
of wildflowers in the foreground - poppies, cornflowers, oxeye daisies, dandelions - the
beautiful colours of this remarkable roadside display.
The city appears almost incidental in the distance, viewed at this range, and yet its place-
ment is highly strategic. These combination views of wildflowers and landscape were a
speciality of Nicholl’s and feature a number of locations including; Newcastle, Fairhead,
Howth, Bray, Carlingford, Lough Swilly, Ramelton, Rathmullan, Dunluce Castle, and
Downhill Mussendon Temple. This style of depiction surely came from Nicholl’s interest
in topographical art, combined with his interest in botanical illustration, which became
popular and refined in terms of accuracy in the eighteenth century due to advances in
the printing process, of which Nicholl had first-hand experience. In Ireland’s Painters
1600-1940, Crookshank and Glin, write ‘In those near-surrealist watercolours...there is
an originality which makes them amongst the most haunting...Irish paintings of the
early nineteenth century. These are his masterpieces.’ (p210) John Hewitt observes ‘...
his originality appears most strongly [in his] landscape of distant hills, foregrounded
by a wedge or bank of roadside wild flowers. By scratch and scrape of the surface of
his paper,...for the spray-frayed tips of breaking waves, he gave his flowers and grasses
an illusory precision and finish.’ The ‘sgraffitto’ or ‘scraping out’ technique that Hewitt
mentions is the ideal device to capture the delicacy and fine lines within the wildflow-
ers. Nicholl began painting these wildflowers works quite early in his career. In 1830,
the sister of his patron Emerson Tennent wrote a sonnet after receiving from the artist
‘a beautiful coloured drawing of flowers.’ He was a highly prolific artist and the Ulster
Museum alone has almost 400 works by Andrew Nicholl.
This catalogue entry was based on a previous write up on “A distant view of Derry” by
Marianne O’Kane Boal in our May 2013 sale.
