An artist’s oeuvre will inevitably include plenty of routine images when he churns out that much material, but there was something memorable about this signed and dated, 1833 watercolour, right, of Mount Snowdon offered at the Ashford rooms of Hobbs Parker (10% buyer’s premium) on April 15.
Entered from a private client in Dover, whose father had acquired it back in the 1920s or ‘30s, this substantial 10 3/4in x 2ft 2in (26. x 66cm) watercolour showed a group of figures – at least one of whom appears to be sketching – sitting above the clouds on the summit of Snowdon looking across towards Anglesey over what is now the Snowdonia National Park.
Given that Varley would have been 55 in 1833 and the helicopter hadn’t yet been invented, it seems unlikely that this was an on-the-spot study in aerial perspective. Nonetheless, it remains an extremely evocative scene for anyone with a taste for the UK’s mountain landscapes and was understandably pushed to £6200 by three telephone bidders and two in the room against an estimate of £4000-6000. The eventual buyer was a member of the London trade.
Even more expensive at this Kent sale, however, were two unframed mid-19th century 17 x 13in (43 x 33cm) watercolours of Australian landscape subjects, one of which was inscribed Gum trees, natives oppossum hunting, S.A. They were also dated 1854 and monogrammed S.T.G., which at least two potential buyers spotted as the initials of the Australian artist Samuel Thomas Gill (1818-1880). An awareness that Gill’s watercolours have fetched substantial five-figure auction prices in recent years encouraged five telephone bidders to push this lot to £8600.
An impossible overall view... but Snowdon is sale high point
JOHN Varley Senior (1778-1842) was one of the most prolific watercolourists of his generation, exhibiting no fewer than 700 works at the Old Water Colour Society between 1805 and 1842.
