Francis Danby

(Wexford 1793-1861 Exmouth)

Landscape: Ulysses at the court of Alcinous, going to the athletic games instituted in honour of his visit

Footnotes

Provenance
Painted for Joseph Gillott
His sale, Christie's, London, 19 April 1872, lot 126 (as The Arrival of Aeneas)
Collection of Thomas Pemberton
His sale, Christie's, London, 30 April 1874, lot 78 (as Aeneas Witnessing the games), bought together with other Danby works in this sale by
J. Watson of Warley Hall, Birmingham, who moved to Berwick House, Shrewsbury in 1879, and by descent to the present owner

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1858, no. 521

Literature
E. Adams, Francis Danby: Varieties of poetic landscape, London, 1973, p. 184, no 74, ill. fig. 92

This lyrical landscape – what Danby termed one of his 'poetical landscapes' - was painted between 1855 and 1858 when he was living in Exmouth with his sons, spending his spare time boat-building and sailing around the coves of the Devon coast. In contrast to his earlier life, much of which he spent travelling on the Continent dogged by financial uncertainty, this later period was one of relative contentment which is perhaps reflected in the tranquillity of the present scene. His principal patron, John Gibbons, had died in 1851 and was replaced by another midlands industrialist, Joseph Gillott, who made his fortune manufacturing pen nibs. He became a significant supporter of Danby in the 1850s and it was for him that Ulysses was painted; it was conceived as a pendant to The court, palace and gardens of Alcinous, although the latter work was exhibited on its own at the RA in 1857 because, as Danby wrote to Gillott in March of 1857, Ulysses was 'not quite in a state that I would like to call it finished'; as a result it was shown the following year.

Danby had used evening coastal landscapes as the vehicle for many subject pictures during his career, starting most notably with An Enchanted Island of 1824 which received great critical acclaim when it was exhibited. To some degree these paintings have their roots in the fantasy landscapes that he and his fellow Bristol artists painted during their evening sketching meetings in the 1820s, loosely inspired by the landscape around the Avon gorge. The main source, however, is clearly Claude whose paintings had been a lifelong influence on Danby; so much so that he willingly copied one of the Louvre Claudes for a patron in 1838. He admired Claude's ability to evoke light effects and atmosphere, but like the earlier artist believed there should be a didactic and emotional element to landscape painting: 'As to landscapes without poetry or human interest, I would as soon be a painter of Wales' he wrote. Perhaps living beside the sea heightened his interest in light effects; without doubt the poetic landscape and dramatic evening light in Ulysses are the aspects that are most immediately striking: the figures become evident only on closer inspection. In his monograph on the artist Eric Adams comments 'Ulysses is of interest as the very last product of the classical tradition in English landscape painting, which it sends off in a fitting autumnal glory.'

Many of Danby's exhibited paintings of the 1840s and '50s were either destroyed or are now untraced, and hardly any examples of these large-scale works have come to the auction market in the last 50 years; the present work is all the more remarkable for having been retained in the same private collection since 1879, just a few years after it was sold in Gillott's posthumous sale.