Adam's Country House Collections Day II - 10th October 2023

234 669 FREDERICK NEWENHAM (1807-1859) ‘Rich and Rare were the Gems She Wore’: Portrait of a Lady Oil on canvas laid down on wood, 91.5 x 71 cm Signed and dated 1854 Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1854 (no. 1084) Literature: William Laffan, in Nicola Figgis (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume 2 (Dublin, London, New Hav- en, 2014) pp. 385-86, illustrated fig 394 Newenham is among the talented group of artist to emerge from Cork in the nineteenth-century and is noted in Peter Murray’s history of Cork art as a mem- ber of the artistic family whose members also included Robert O’Callaghan Ne- wenham, the landscape painter, and William Newenham of Coolmore, county Cork, who combined his role as Superintendent General of Barracks with an active career as a topographical artist. According to Strickland, Frederick Ne- wenham was born in Cork in 1807, but, like Daniel Maclise and James Barry, he made his name in London where ‘he achieved some success, becoming a fashionable painter of ladies’ portraits’. However he also painted history and an- ecdotal pictures which he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1838 to 1855 as well as sending seventeen paintings to the British Institution between 1841 and 1852. The subjects of these were largely drawn from history and included Crom- well Dictating to Milton (1850) and Princess Elizabeth Examined by the Council (1852). As William Laffan notes in Art and Architecture of Ireland (2014), ‘the sheer scale of some of these attests to Newenham,’s ambition – the Cromwell picture measures 11 ft across’. Newenham was also commissioned to paint por- traits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His technical ability is clearly appar- ent in this work which takes its subject from Moore’s Melodies, which famously also inspired Maclise, Newenham’s elder by one year. Rich and rare were the gems she wore And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore But oh! Her beauty was far beyond Her sparkling gems, or snow white wand. An allegory of ‘Erin’s honour and Erin’s pride’, it tells the story of a young lady of great beauty’ who ‘adorned with jewels and costly dress, undertook a journey alone, from one end of [Ireland] to another, but ‘such an impression had the laws and government of [King Brien] made on the minds of all the people, that no attempt was made upon her honour, nor was she robbed of her clothes of jewels’. Newenham’s picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854 under the title ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore’. It shows the young lady preparing for her jour- ney, her jewel box in the table and her looking glass to the left – rather recalling iconography of The Lady of Shallot, so beloved of contemporary Pre-Raphaelite artists. Described in Art and Architecture of Ireland as ‘an accomplished piece of painting; which shows Newenham to have fine colourist working in a polished high Victorian manner’, it invites further study on this largely forgotten contem- porary of Maclise. € 3,000 - 5,000