Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

As already noted, the present pair of views of Dublin were sold at Christie’s on Wednesday 6 March 1776 catalogued as [William] Ashford ‘Two Views of the Bay of Dublin’ . The catalogue makes clear that the great James Christie (Fig. 19) himself took the sale, which was, indeed, his almost inevitable practice: ‘Which will be sold by auction, by Mr. Christie, at his Great Room, next Cumberland House, Pall-Mall, on Wednesday, March 6, 1776, and the following day’ . All may not have been quite as it appeared in this auction and there is compelling evidence that the description of the sale as comprising the ‘collection of capital pictures of Robert Alex- ander, Esq deceased’ was neither full nor frank. Instead, an annotated copy of the catalogue in Christie’s archives lists (in abbreviated form) other sellers next to their respective lots. 60 While certainly Alex[ander] was a seller he was not the only one. Next to the present pair of works by Ash- ford in the annotated catalogue still at Christie’s recording sellers is written ‘Lord Dart[rey]’. Quite what is going on here is a little murky. But this seems to have been an early instance of the practice of introducing ‘other properties’ into a sale headlined by an- other name – there are few new tricks in the art trade. It is worth bearing in mind that Ashford was something of an operator who most unusually straddled all of the Irish artists’ organisations from the Society of Artists in the 1760s to the Royal Hibernian Academy in the 1820s. Indeed, he was elected as the inaugural president of the latter body, having already served as the president of the second iteration of the Society of Artists in Ireland. He also exhibited with the Society of Artists in London (of which he was elected a fellow and, yet again, president) and at the Royal Academy. In 1819 he held a solo show – at this date still an unusual practice – at the Dublin Society’s house in Hawkins Street. In 1804 the artist’s friend Horace Hone, who would be well placed to know, noted that Ashford earned ‘2 to 300 a year independent of his profession’ and it is possible to identify some of the sources of this income. 61 He acted as a Dublin agent for Thomas Milton whose prints could be purchased at Ashford’s house and was also involved in property deal- ing. 62 He sold at auction both his own work and that of his contemporaries including George Barret, Philip de Louth- erboug (1740-1812) and Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714- 1789). For example, in June 1790 at Christie’s he offered five of his own landscapes including a view of Killarney and on 11 February 1804, again at Christie’s, he offered more than a dozen of his landscapes. 63 Indeed, earlier in London he had been involved in the unsuccessful attempt to set up a gallery, the British School, in Berners Street while in Dublin he seems to have been involved in the auc- tioneering business. Saunder’s News-Letter for 20 April 1785 advertised that ‘the genuine pictures, painted and collected by the truly ingenious artist Mr. Kettle, late a resident of the city, who is now abroad, will…be sold by auction on Friday, the 22nd instant, at Mr. Ashford’s, No 27 College Green’. Given Ashford’s documented dealings in the art market and specifically his track record selling his work at Chris- tie’s, taken together with the fact that the original ven- dor of the present pair of paintings is recorded as being a known patron of the artist with whom at just this junc- ture he was in close contact, it seems highly likely that the 1776 sale was an earlier attempt to raise Ashford’s name in London and that Lord Dartrey was giving him cover so that it was not apparent who was behind this exercise in self-promotion. ‘which will be sold by auction, by Mr. Christie’ ASHFORD AND THE ART MARKET Fig 19. Thomas Gainsborough 1727-88 Portrait of James Christie (1730-1803) The J.P. Getty Museum