Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 26 MARCH 2025

76 56 ERSKINE NICOL RSA ARA (1825-1904) Going to Market: River Landscape with Figures in a boat, near Derravaragh, County Westmeath Oil on canvas 32 x 53cm (12½ x 20¾“) Signed ‘ E.Nicol ARSA and dated (18) ‘57 € 5,000 - 8,000 As dawn breaks, a group of travellers moves slowly in a rather overladen boat, propelled by a single oarsman, along one of the waterways of the extended Shannon basin between Castlepollard and Mullingar, perhaps the River Inny. This was a part of Ireland that Nicol knew intimately. Having established a studio in the vicinity of Lough Derravaragh, he made the landscape and people of the Bog of Allen his own. Indeed, he even named his London home Clonave Villa in honour of the location of his base on the north of Lough Derravaragh. As Dr. Brendan Rooney writes ‘The local community and surrounding Westmeath countryside inspired many of Nicol’s best and most sensitive, pictures ( Art and Architecture of Ireland , vol. 2, 389). This judgment certainly applies to the carefully observed, yet quietly lyrical, scene depicted here. In this work dated 1857, when the artist was thirty-two, he imbues his figures with a quiet solemnity quite at odds with the occasional stage Irish tendency to which later in his career Nicol occasionally succumbed. The generally ochre palette is enlivened with a few chromatic highlights, notably the flecks of red strategically positioned though the composition. For a quite different, though clearly related, composition of the same year, titled by the artist, Market Day, Derravaragh, Co. Westmeath , see Adam’s, Important Irish Art 6 Dec, 2023, lot 71 and for the Bog at Derravaragh see Adam’s, Important Irish Art, April 2014 lot 101.