ADAM'S - IMPORTANT IRISH ART, WEDNESDAY 29TH MARCH 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

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64
Watercolour, 34 x 48.5cm (13¼ x 19’’)
Signed
There is debate as to the location of this work, with some suggesting it is an early view towards Bray. Regardless of its location, it
is a strong example of Nicholl’s coastal flower studies.
€ 5,000 - 7,000
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 lat-
er 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 which is totally captivating.’ This series, of which ‘View through a Bank of Poppies and Summer Flowers thought to be Bray, Co.
Wicklow” 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 a castle . The eye eagerly explores the frieze of wildflowers in the foreground - poppies, cornflowers, oxeye daisies, dan-
delions - the beautiful colours of this remarkable roadside display. The city appears almost incidental in the distance, viewed at this range, and yet its placement is
highly strategic. These combination views of wildflowers and landscape were a speciality of Nicholl’s and feature a number of locations including; Newcastle, Fair-
head, Howth, Bray (Possiby this work ?), 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 cen-
tury. 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 wild-
flowers. 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 by Marianne O’Kane Boal .