Francis Danby, 
Irish 1793-1861- 
A Lake Scene in Ireland; 
oil on panel, bears label for the 1989...

Francis Danby, 
Irish 1793-1861- 

A Lake Scene in Ireland; 

oil on panel, bears label for the 1989 Tate Gallery exhibition verso, 63.5 x 76.5 cm. 

Provenance: 
Purchased in the Bristol area, c.1930, by F.T. Love;
Thence by descent. 

Exhibited: 
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 'Francis Danby, 1793-1861', 5 November 1988-22 January 1989, no.1. 
London, Tate Britain, 'Francis Danby, 1793-1861', 15 February 1989-9 April 1989, cat. no.1. 

Literature: 
Eric Adams, 'Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Landscape', Yale University Press, 1974, pp.6, 7, 169. 
John Hutchinson, 'James Arthur O'Connor', exh. cat. National Gallery of Ireland, 1985, pp.87-89. 
Francis Greenacre, 'Francis Danby, 1793-1861', exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery in association with the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 1988. 

Note: 
There is good reason to believe this work is by both Danby and James Arthur O'Connor (1792-1841) and was painted immediately after the two close friends had walked from London to Bristol in the summer of 1813. 

It once bore a label attributing it to Danby and another unidentified artist. W.J. O'Driscoll in 'A Memoir of Daniel Maclise' (1871) states that Danby, O'Connor and George Petrie (1790-1866) after their arrival in Bristol 'painted a kind of "joint-stock picture" on a pretty large scale, each taking that part of the work for which he felt himself best qualified. O'Connor did the landscape and background, Petrie finished some architectural ruins, and to Danby was allotted the figures and foreground. The picture was sold by them in Bristol, and the proceeds divided. O'Connor and Petrie returned to Dublin.' Petrie did not, in fact, pass through Bristol with his friends having been earlier summoned back by his father to Dublin from London. Nor is the architecture in the painting of sufficient substance or antiquarian interest to be likely to be by Petrie. 

Although the naive figures are close to those in O'Connor's earliest dated oil paintings, their profile faces, Roman noses and hump backs are closer still to the figures in the foregrounds of some of Danby's earliest Bristol watercolours. The rocks and foreground foliage, the crowded ferry boat and carefully drawn reflections in the water foreshadow Danby's later Bristol work, while the trees, the distance and especially the sky are closer to O'Connor. 

It has been suggested that the scene is a view in County Wicklow, a reminder that John Mintorn, writing to the 'Western Daily Press' on 20 February 1860, tells us that Danby's first sales in Bristol were 'Two small sketches of the Wicklow Mountains, near Dublin, in a somewhat dilapidated state'. However, Mintorn also implies that O'Connor stayed only a day in Bristol before catching the sailing packet to Cork. 

'A Lake Scene in Ireland' was not Danby's first oil painting. He had studied at the drawing school of the Dublin Society and in 1813 had exhibited 'Landscape - Evening' at the Society of Artists' annual exhibition in Hawkins Street, Dublin. It was the sale of this landscape to Archdeacon Hill of Dublin that enabled Danby to go to London. 

(Francis Greenacre, 'Francis Danby, 1793-1861', exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery in association with the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 1988).