ADAM'S THE LIBRARY COLLECTION 29th April 2025

149 www.adams.ie The Library Collection | 29 th April 2025 281 WILLIAM JOSEPH JULIUS CAESAR BOND (1833-1926) Boats on the Water, church steeple beyond, Galway Oil on canvas, 74 x 102cm Signed and dated 1850, lower right € 1,000 - 1,500 William Joseph Julius Caeser Bond, otherwise known as ‘Alphabet Bond’ was a well-regarded English landscape and marine painter and member of the Liverpool Academy in the 19th century. Bond began quite humbly as the son of a post-office clerk and trained in the art of picture restoration and cleaning before taking up painting on the advice of local tobacco merchant and collector John Miller who had admired some of his Liverpool dock sketches. As referenced in Denys Brook- Hart’s comprehensive book on the subject entitled ‘British 19th Century Marine Paint- ing’, Bond forged a rather illustrious career in the North of the country, earning the moniker ‘The Turner of the North’ as his later style favoured the semi-impressionistic style and warm palette associated with the London born artist. This painting presented is identified as quite an early work by the artist by both the date of 1850 and the decidedly tighter use of brushstrokes and attention to detail. The scene presented is certainly one of Bond’s lesser-known examples as it depicts the Woodquay area of Galway city, specifically ‘Sickeen’, now familiar to the viewer as St. Brendan’s Avenue. Silhouetted in the background we see the spire of St. Nicholas’s Collegiate Church as it was in 1850 before it was rebuilt and furnished with a clock in 1883 and to the right the Franciscan Abbey built earlier in the 19th century. An assemblage of squat straw-thatched cottages smoke gently in the midground, of which nothing remains today. Bearing in mind that the scene painted was produced during the Great Famine and before the re-development of the city it serves as a valuable record of the urban landscape in the mid-nineteenth century, of which there are few visual records.