Adam's IRISH OLD MASTERS 5th November 2024

92 62 FRANCIS DANBY, A.R.A., 1793-1861 Early Morning: Fisherman’s Home Signed and dated 1841 Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 81cm Provenance: By repute Collection of John Farnworth of Woolton; his sale, Christie’s, 18 May 1874, lot 49 € 10,000 - 15,000 Francis Danby was born at Common, Killinick, County Wex - ford on 16 November 1793. Following the death of his father, the family moved to Dublin in 1807. There, Danby studied at the Dublin Society’s Schools, exhibiting with the Society of Artists in 1813. He continued his studies under the tutelage of James Arthur O’Connor (1792-1841), and, alongside their friend George Petrie (1790-1866), he settled in England in 1813. Running out of money, O’Connor and Petrie returned to Dublin, but Danby persisted, finding patronage in Bath. Remaining there for more than a decade, Danby undertook a painting trip to Norway in 1825, a trip that would alter his artistic output for the remainder of his career. In 1825, writing to his patron, John Gibbons, Danby opined that Norway held ‘beautiful scenes... extremely picturesque on a smaller scale, but of the most unusual and peculiar sew [sic]’. It took the artist a number of years to assimilate the work into a broader ‘Norwegian’ oeuvre , which included this com- position (Eric Adams, Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Land- scape , Yale University Press, 1973). Danby probably included in this work recollections of his 1825 trip to Norway, combined with motifs studied on his later visits. Indeed, he often re- worked or revisited images, as this painting and its two larger versions demonstrate. Danby exhibited Fisherman’s Home at the Royal Academy in 1846, along with How Shepherds Lose Their Sheep , as a finished but unvarnished picture.