Neal Auction 2012

8 W 11. W.C. Crymer (American or British, active late 19th c .), “Orientalist Outdoor Bazaar”, 1885, watercolor and gouache, signed and dated “W.C. Crymer 1885” lower right, sight 9 in. x 12 1/4 in., matted and framed. $200/400 13. James Barry (Irish, active in Italy and England, 1741-1806) , “A Group of Recumbent Figures Huddled Among Blankets”, 1792, ink and wash on laid paper, with all corners missing but made up on backing card, dated in English “March 1792” at lower left, 6 5/8 x 8 1/8 in., perhaps signed or inscribed en verso(?); laid down on card stock, 7 1/8 x 8 7/8 in., the latter inscribed en verso in 20th c. black ink, “Master of the Giants—James (Burry) / -Barry / Byrny”, and in mid-20th c. red pencil, “Fuseli [sic] / Christie’s Auction / April 1961”. $1000/1500 Provenance: Christie’s, London (1961); purchased there by James R. Lamantia Jr., New Orleans and New York. Note: Though Lamantia bought this impressive drawing as a “Fuseli” (at a Christie’s auction that he attended personally in April 1961, per his note on the outer mount), his question-mark preceding that name indicates that he (correctly) did not fully endorse Christie’s attribution. The alternative ascriptions entered in black ink at the top of the verso—though mutually contradictory—are respectively equally mistaken, and right on the mark. This fine drawing actually has nothing whatever to do with the so-called “Master of the Giants,” a gifted amateur artist working in transparent black and grey washes in Rome in 1779, as recorded on various sheets of a now-dismembered notebook which suggested his name (purchased 1949, exhibited London 1952, separate sheets at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University [1964] and recently [2002] with Lowell Libson, London). The three alternate readings of the name of James Barry, however, do plausibly indicate that an inscription or signature was formerly visible (perhaps on the reverse of the pasted-down sheet), and that those various options were observed in its lettering. James Barry was born in Cork, and trained in Dublin (1763), London (1764), Paris (1765), Rome (1766-70), and Bologna (1771). In London he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1773, and became its Professor of Painting in 1782. His masterpiece was a series of huge canvases representing The Progress of Human Culture, which he executed for the Society of Arts in 1777-84; he was expelled from the R. A. in 1799 as a result of his eccentricity and irascibility, though at the end he was awarded a funeral and burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. This rare dated drawing is emblematic of Barry’s later work, with its heavy, jagged lines, its idiosyncratic shading, and its compression of emotionally charged forms—in “a coagulation of bodies” (as Tomory observed), or “a fantasy of intertwining shapes…achieving an expressionistic power rare in British art” (Cummings). References: William L. Pressly, “Barry,” Grove Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner, ed., London, 1996, 34 vols., vol. 3, pp. 284-287; Frederick Cummings and Allen Staley, Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860, Philadelphia, 1968, pp. 114- 118; Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli, New York, 1972, p. 210, and passim. 12. Continental School, early 19th c ., “Ruins; the Castle Keep”, oil on canvas, unsigned, 29 in. x 37 in., in a carved wood frame. $1500/2500 12 13