Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

40 Although later, Ashford, as a more established artist, would sell his work at auction under his own name, it was quite common to wish not to be identified as a sell- er – particularly if the vendor and the artist were one and the same. This reluctance is evident earlier in the century when the Dublin print dealer Michael Ford ad- vertised that he would act as agent ’with the utmost secrecy for those who would not be known to buy or sell’. 64 Again, the use of a titled frontman to enter goods into an auction is, even today, a not wholly unknown practice. Something not dissimilar may have been the case in April 1783 when Lord Aldborough, a patron with whom Ashford enjoyed a particularly close friendship, brought over to London some of his landscapes in an (unsuccessful) attempt to have them accepted by the Royal Academy. 65 If this reading of events is correct, Ashford will have been highly gratified at the elevated company in which he found himself on the title page of the Christie’s catalogue which noted that the sale included: ‘works of the most fol- lowing EMINENT MASTERS: RAPHAEL, CARRAVAGIO [sic], CARRACCI, TITIAN…and several of the most esteemed and de- servedly admired performances of Mess. Wright, Stubbs, Zof fany, Marlow, Ashford, &c. &c’. It seems highly appropriate that in one of his first attempts to crack the London market and compete on the international stage, Ashford sent to London two of the finest pictures he had painted hither- to – or indeed would subsequently – and works which captured so well ‘one of the most delightful and picturesque scenes in the world’. 66 Fig 20. Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) Christie’s Auction Room (1808) Private collection