58
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
65
Francis William Topham RA OWS (1808-1877)
GOSSIPS AT THE HOLY WELL, 1874
watercolour
signed and dated lower left;
11.75
by 17.75in. (29.85 by 45.09cm)
Provenance
Gorry Gallery, Dublin;
Where purchased by the present owner
Exhibited
‘
An Exhibition of 17th – 20th Century Irish Paintings’, Gorry
Gallery, Dublin, 5-18 December 2010, catalogue no. 17
Born in Leeds, this skilled watercolourist and genre painter visited
Ireland repeatedly from the 1840s onwards, focusing on the peasantry
in the Claddagh and around Connemara. Here he shows children
gathering water at a well, and characteristically he uses body colour,
with some scratching out on the girl’s hair in the foreground. Related
titles exhibited by Topham include
Gossips at a Well
(
London, Guildhall
Art Gallery),
The Holy Well
(
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery) and
At
the Holy Well
(
Glasgow Art Gallery)
1
.
A father of twelve, he often
favoured scenes of women and children. His work was often engraved
for the
Illustrated London News,
and he was a member of The Artist’s
Society in Clipstone Street, devoted to ‘The systematic study of
veritable rustic figures from the life’ (rather than artists’ models dressed
up). He also painted in Wales, Scotland and Spain, where he died in
1877.
Dr Claudia Kinmonth
Author:
Irish Rural Interiors in Art,
Yale University Press, 2006
1
C.Wright, with C. Gordon & M. Peskett Smith,
British and Irish Paintings in Public
Collections,
Yale University Press, 2006, p.772
We are grateful to the Gorry Gallery and the author for their kind permission to
reproduce this note.
€
1,500-
€
2,000 (
£1,250-£1,600 approx)