About this lot
Description
* Francis Wheatley, RA (British, 1747-1801)
Adelaide and Fonrose
oil on canvas, oval
86 x 67.5cm
Provenance:
P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd;
D C Paterson Esq. by 1970;
Alexander Hume Esq.,
His Sale, Sotheby's, London, 21st November 1979, lot 52,
The Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, Inc.
Exhibited:
Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, and Leeds, City Art Gallery, Francis Wheatley RA, 1747-1801: Paintings, drawings and engravings, 15th-25th June, and 8th July-8th August 1965, no. 10
Literature:
Mary Webster, Francis Wheatley, 1970, p. 133, no. 48
Footnote:
This painting most likely illustrates a scene from Jean-François Marmontel's romantic play The Shepherdess of the Alps. The play, first published in 1766 as part of Marmontel's Moral Tales, became the rage in both England and France and inspired many paintings and prints. The story is the tragic tale of Adelaide and her lover, the Count D'Orestan, two young French aristocrats, who, despite their families' objections, run away together. Their happiness is short-lived as the Count dies suddenly. A grief-stricken Adelaide digs her lover's grave with her bare hands, renounces the world and her family, and becomes a shepherdess. She at last finds happiness after she reveals her true identity to a French nobleman, Fonrose.
A watercolour of the present composition with slight differences, signed and dated 1786 by Wheatley, is in the British Museum (inv. no. 1866,1013.545) (see Webster, p.62, fig.72).
All proceeds from the sale of this and another eleven paintings (lots 57-68) will benefit the activities of the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, Inc., which continues its founder’s support of research, publishing, presentation, and practice in museums and music. Throughout his long life, Mr. Lunde supported more than forty museums in his native New York, across the United States and in Europe with loans, gifts, and funding. Mr. Lunde was a proud New Yorker with roots in Norway. He was keenly interested in nineteenth-century Scandinavian and Swiss landscape painting, Old master painting and Asian decorative arts.
Condition report:
Framed 108 x 90cm
The painting is executed in oil on a canvas support which has been lined. The canvas tension is good and the picture is in plane. The edges of the lining canvas are degraded and tears are starting to form. The thin paint layers have suffered from wear and abrasion, notable in the background of the picture. Old damages have been repaired and retouched. There is overpaint covering areas of wear as well as reinforcing elements of the composition including the sitter’s faces. The varnish is clear, even and semi-glossy.
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