William Davis

(British, 1812-1873)

Pond near Highgate

Footnotes

Provenance
Anon. sale, Sotheby's Belgravia, 9 March 1976, lot 43.
Julian Hartnoll, London.
Private collection, UK (on loan to Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead).

The present lot probably depicts a pond at Millfield Lane, Highgate.

The Liverpool School

In the middle years of the nineteenth century the city of Liverpool saw the emergence of a remarkable group of artists, some born in the city while others had transferred there for professional reasons, and who came retrospectively to be known as the Liverpool School. The foremost source of information about this disparate circle, linked principally by their association with the Liverpool Academy, is H.C. Marillier's The Liverpool School of Painters, published in 1904.

A leading figure among the painters of modern-life subjects based in the North-West, James Campbell showed scenes set in the streets of Liverpool and Birkenhead, and rustic subjects done during painting expeditions in the countryside of the Wirral peninsular, north Wales and south Lancashire. Campbell lived in London as a young man but returned to Liverpool in about 1851, enrolling as a probationer in the Liverpool Academy schools and later elected as a member of the Academy. By the late 1850s he was regarded as the de facto leader of the progressive group of painters in the city and was at the same time acknowledged more widely by being invited to show at the Russell Place exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art in London in 1857 and in the following year was asked to send works to the travelling exhibition of contemporary British held in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Campbell's The Fisherman's Lesson (lot 27) appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1861 and is typical of the figure subjects showing day-to-day events in the lives of working-class folk for which the artist was known. According to Marillier, Campbell often painted at Eastham Woods on the Cheshire shore of the Mersey and on other occasions at Bidston on the Wirral. It is likely that The Fisherman's Lesson records a visit to one or other of these places. Among the collectors of Campbell's paintings in Liverpool John Miller was pre-eminent, while George Rae, of Birkenhead, and James Leathart, of Gateshead, were also notable enthusiasts for his distinctive works.

A less well known but nonetheless remarkable painter who likewise specialised in subjects showing men and women struggling against hardship was Joseph Edward Worrall. Omitted by Marillier, biographical information for the artist is scarce. Nonetheless, we have here a delightful genre subject showing a young woman earning her living as a street-trader and which may be recognised as the work entitled Three-a-penny shown at the Liverpool Institution of Fine Arts in 1867 (lot 30). The woman has taken three oranges from her basket and offers them to the viewer. The wall before which she and her dog stand consists of red sandstone, a building material frequently seen in Liverpool and its environs. The open space behind and the church and neighbouring terraces that form the background are as yet unidentified but are likely to have been in the relatively genteel neighbourhood of Upper Parliament Street, running from Liverpool eastwards towards Toxteth and where Worrall lived in the 1860s.

Careful attention to detail and the use of strong colour and a distinctive method whereby paint was applied in glazed surfaces to give a luminous and transparent effect were recognisable characteristics of the Liverpool artists' work as landscapists. Daniel Alexander Williamson was a member of a dynasty of artists prominent in the city from early in the nineteenth century. Having spent his early adult life in London, he returned to the North-West in about 1860, settling in the village of Warton in north Lancashire. During the following few years, Williamson painted his most intense and characteristic works and of which small group the work bearing the title Westmorland Hills - Effect before Rain (lot 28) is one. The view taken shows the blocks of limestone which form natural pavements on Warton Crag, while the distant horizon consists of the southern fells of the Lake District in Westmorland, seen beyond the out-of-view Morecambe Bay. The boy seen in the foreground gathers dry bracken, presumably so as to burn it and thus safeguard his flock as bracken is poisonous to sheep and cattle.

Another landscape specialist, and who like Williamson in the early 1860s aimed at the most minute detail in his landscapes but who subsequently broadened his handling to seek more atmospheric effects, was John Edward Newton. The work by him in the present group is probably his 1864 Liverpool Academy exhibit View near Sefton (lot 29). It shows a pond or stretch of slow-flowing river in the flat, fertile farming country close to Litherland to the north of Liverpool and through which the River Alt meanders. Newton lived in Litherland for about a year from 1864 and painted the south Lancashire topography on several occasions (including some with interchangeable or alternative titles leading to confusion as to which is which).

William Davis, who had been born in Ireland in 1812 had settled in Liverpool by the mid-century. A leading figure in the context of the Liverpool Academy, as an exhibitor and from 1856 head of the drawing school there, he was an influential supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite cause in the various acrimonious disputes that occurred between the rival factions supporting either the progressive or a more conservative artistic tendencies in the period and which came to the fore in the matter of the awarding of prizes. The patron John Miller encouraged Davis to devote himself to landscape and formed a collection of his works including subjects local to Liverpool, Ireland and the west of Scotland.

Davis was a friend of Ford Madox Brown and shared his view that the point of painting landscape was to capture the colour and texture of a setting and that this might be found in the most obscure and unprepossessing spots. Davis's command of the infinitely various tints of foliage, sometimes broken by the colours of brickwork or masonry when architectural elements were introduced (he had a particular fondness for mills) was entirely his own. On occasions he painted with Pre-Raphaelite inspired exactitude, but gradually shifted towards the handling of paint with instinctive freedom achieving effects that are strikingly impressionistic. Patches of wet paint run together and mix on the canvas. Flashes of strong colour make the overall impression vibrant and living. Parts of the landscape are seen deep in shadow while in other areas the sun blazes down making the impact of these utterly unpretentious landscapes overwhelming. Davis's A Pond near Highgate (lot 26) shows the narrow side-road that forms the eastern boundary of Hampstead Heath close to the series of boating and bathing lakes. Although without an inscribed date this painting will have been made after the artist's move to London in 1870, and where he spent the three last years of his life.

Liverpool saw an extraordinary flowering of the arts in the middle years of the nineteenth century, greater than any other British city outside London. There was a particular open-mindedness and generosity on the part of the munificent patrons in Liverpool and Birkenhead whose wealth derived from shipping and trade, banking and insurance. Likewise, those who administered the city's principal art institution, the Liverpool Academy, the premises of which were in Old Post Office Place, believed in the importance of art which showed familiar places and people that were often unremarkable but which they made extraordinary by the sincerity and originality of their vision.

We are grateful to Christopher Newall for compiling this introduction and for his assistance in cataloguing the following lots.