ADAM'S IRISH OLD MASTERS 14 MAY 2026

32 26 WILLIAM VAN DER HAGEN (FL.1720 - 1745) A Harbour Scene, Men-of-War Anchored in a Calm Sea with Fisher- men beside a Tower; A Coastal Scene with Ships in Heavy Seas off a Rocky Coast A Pair, Oil on panel, each 24 x 30cm Each signed and dated 1738 also each signed on the reverse of the panels. Provenance: Sotheby’s, London, 24 November 1972 (lot 32); Private Collection € 25,000 - 35,000 William van de Hagen is rightly seen as the founder of the innovative school of landscape painting which flourished in Georgian Ireland and these small works, painted here in 1738, share both in the European tradition in which he trained and in the nascent Irish landscape school with whose genesis the artist is so closely linked. This was a point made by both Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin: ‘The importance of Van der Hagen’s example to the creation of the great landscape school that flourished in Ireland in the second half of the eighteenth century cannot be overstated’. Crookshank and Glin make a telling, if to some provocative, comparison between Van der Hagen’s capriccio landscapes executed in Ireland in the 1730s and those of Roman ruins painted in the following decade by his Italian contemporary Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765), examples of which were brought back from the Grand Tour by Joseph Leeson, 1st Earl of Milltown (1701-83) to hang at the recently-built Russborough, County Wicklow: ‘Leeson could have acquired as good a capriccio back in Dub- lin’. They elaborate: ‘In the finest of his capriccio land- scapes Van der Hagen equals the achievements of his contemporaries of Europe, indeed often anticipating developments on the continent’ (Crookshank and Glin in William Laffan (ed.), The Sublime and the Beautiful, Irish Art 1700-1830, (London, 2001) pp. 52 & 54). Van der Hagen was a versatile artist and a remarkable series of painted wall hangings, part of a collabora- tion with Edward Lovett Pearce (1699-1733), the great architect of Dublin’s Parliament House, has recently been acquired by the State for display in Dublin Castle, whose ballroom they once graced (See William Der- ham, ‘Captain Pearce’s genius? The eighteenth-centu- ry painted hangings of Dublin Castle’, in Irish Heritage Studies, vol.2 (2026), pp.84–107’). This welcome return forms an appropriate vindication of Crookshank and Glin’s prescient assessment of Van der Hagen’s im- portance, made twenty-five give years ago: ‘Just as architects such as Pearce are being acknowledged as among the most original of the period, artists such as Van der Hagen, working in the cosmopolitan milieu of Dublin in the first half of the eighteenth century, must be hailed as the equal of their continental counter- parts’ (ibid.). In contrast to the loosely painted hangings from Dub- lin Castle, the enormous scale of which necessitated assistance from members of his studio (specifically, perhaps, Joseph Tudor), the present pair of small cabinet pictures are painted with great delicacy and refinement, and Van der Hagen signs both of them twice – rather proudly as if pleased with their success. The two works portray distinctly contrasting atmos- pheric conditions. One shows a calm and peaceful