Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 9th December 2020

www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 9 th December 2020 119 104 ANDREW NICHOLL RHA (1804-1886) A View of Derry through a Bank of Wild flowers Watercolour, 34 x 52cm (13½ x 20½’’) Signed Combination views of wildflowers and landscape were a speciality of Nicholl’s and feature a number of lo- cations including; Newcastle, Fairhead, Howth, Bray, Carlingford, Lough Swilly, Ramelton, Rathmullan, Dun- luce Castle, and in this instance, the city of Derry. 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.’ 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 wildflowers. He was a highly prolific artist and the Ulster Museum alone has almost 400 works by Andrew Nicholl. € 6,000 - 10,000