Thomas Lawrie (sometimes spelled as Laurie, not to be confused with Thomas Laurie the theatre sponsor) was a painter and paperhanger. Before 1850, he had opened Thomas Lawrie & Son at 126 Union Street in Glasgow, Scotland.[1] By 1870, the business had moved to 85 Vincent Street and was advertising its "high-class" wares in the Glasgow Herald.[2] Lawrie & Son sold fine art (especially Old Master and Romantic works) as well as antiques, furniture, and decorative objects.[3] Moreover, a now-lost self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh might have passed through the hands of Lawrie & Co in the end of the 1880s. A letter from Theo van Gogh to Lawrie & Co. hints at such a sale (which would have been only the second known sale during the artist's lifetime). But the transaction does not show up in extant Lawrie & Co. record books and the letter may be a forgery. Moreover, the letter was addressed to Sulley and "Lori" of London in 1888,[4] well before Lawrie & Co. had set up its London offices.
John Hoppner, Princess Amelia (1785), now in the Royal Collection Trust, UK.
The Morning Post also commended the "small but excellent collection of pictures."[6] At the very end of the year, the gallery showed works by Josef Israels, Gheerardt David, and several British artists.[7] In 1894, the London Morning Post described the gallery's guiding principle as “few but fit”: Lawrie & Co. exhibited fine works (including in that year, John Hoppner's portrait of Princess Amelia) but not many of them.[8] In 1895, Lawrie & Co. exhibited more works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, G. F. Watts, and E. Burne-Jones.[9] In 1900, Lawrie & Co. exhibited a selection of early Italian artworks.[10] By the turn of the twentieth century, Lawrie & Co. supplied virtually all Dutch masterworks entering the American market.[11] Two years later, when the gallery moved to 159 New Bond Street, the building itself won praise in the press for its barrel-vaulted vestibule and coved ceilings.[12] Another art dealership, a branch of Knoedler & Co. run by Charles Carstairs, moved into the 15 Old Bond Street space.[13] An exhibition of English school masterworks - including ones by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, William Holman Hunt, Joshua Reynolds, and John Everett Millais, all from the collection of Sir Cuthbert Quilter - was one of Lawrie's first in the new location. The gallery donated the admissions earnings to the King's Hospital Fund.[14] In early 1903, an exhibition on seventeenth-century Dutch painting won praise from The Times of London as an exhibition of "more than average interest." It featured Portrait of the Artist's Sister and The Scribe by Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Boy Reading and another work by Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch's Card Players, and Jacob Ruisdael's Outskirts of a Forest among thirty other pieces.[15]
Jean-Marc Nattier, Elizabeth, Countess of Warwick (1754), originally sold to Henry Clay Frick in 1899, now at The Frick Collection, New York.
In its early twentieth century heyday, Lawrie's important clients included T. G. Arthur (Glasgow-based textile manufacturer[17]), A. J. Kirkpatrick (president of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts[18]), W. A. Coats (British industrialist[19]),[1] D. T. Watson (attorney[20]),[21] and Henry Clay Frick.[22]
Notwithstanding its acclaim, Lawrie & Co. closed its two offices, at 159 New Bond Street, London and 85 St Vincent Street Glasgow on October 31, 1904. By that time, William Duff Lawrie, John Mackillop Brown, and Arthur Joseph Sulley were its partners.[23] Christie, Manson, and Wood (Christie's) auctioned off the defunct gallery's collection of art books.[24] Lawrie, however, stayed in the art world loop: Carstairs, the new tenant of 15 Old Bond Street, wrote to Lawrie in February 1906 about the possible sale of Joshua Reynolds' Lady Harcourt, which he had owned jointly with Lawrie, to Frick.[25][26]
Notes
1 2 Hamilton, Vivien. Millet to Matisse: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Painting from Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002.
↑ "Advertisements & Notices." Glasgow Herald [Glasgow, Scotland] Jan. 13, 1870: n.p. Gale Group: 19th Century British Newspapers.
↑ Bailey, M. "Van Gogh's first sale: a self-portrait in London." Apollo 143(1996): 20-21.
↑ "Messrs. Lawrie's Exhibition." The Saturday Review. March 11, 1893.
↑ "MESSRS. LAWRIE AND CO.'S GALLERY." Morning Post [London, England] Mar. 12, 1893: 3. Gale Group: 19th Century British Newspapers.
↑ "MESSRS. LAWRIE AND CO.'S GALLERY." Morning Post 26 Dec. 1893: 3. Gale Group: 19th Century British Newspapers.
↑ "MESSERS. LAWRIE AND CO.'S GALLERY." Morning Post 29 June 1894: 5. Gale Group: 19th Century British Newspapers.
↑ "Lawrie and Co." Sunday Times [London, England] July 7, 1895: [1]. The Sunday Times Digital Archive.
↑ "Advertisements & Notices." Pall Mall Gazette [London, England] Dec. 10, 1900: n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers.
↑ Reist, Inge ed. British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections across the Pond. Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2014.
↑ Block, Elaine C. and Kenneth Varty. Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.
↑ Tweed, John. The Lord Provosts of Glasgow from 1833 to 1902: Biographical Sketches, with a Chronological Record of the Chief Events in the City's History During that Period. Glasgow: Gowans & Gray, 1902.
↑ Fowle, Frances. Souvenirs and Fêtes Champêtres: William Allan Coats’s Collection of 19th-Century French Paintings. Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, vol 14, pp. 63-70.
↑ ”David Thomas Watson Biography.” TheWatsonInstitute.org.
↑ Weisberg, Gabriel P., DeCourcy E. McIntosh, Alison McQueen. Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890-1910. New York: Frick Art and Historical Center, 1997.
↑ "Finding Aids: The Frick Collection." www.frick.org/sites/default/files/FindingAids/HenryClayFrickArtFiles.html
↑ “Notices, 3 January 1905.” The Edinburgh Gazette, p. 11, January 3, 1905.
↑ "Rival Partners' Bids." Daily Mail [London, England] Feb. 16, 1905: 3. Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896-2004.
↑ Saltzman, Cynthia. Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures." New York: Penguin, 2008.
The year 1890 in art involved some significant events.
The Frick Collection is an art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection features Old Master paintings and European fine and decorative arts, including works by Bellini, Fragonard, Goya, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, Thomas Gainsborough, and many others. The museum was founded by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), and its collection has more than doubled in size since opening to the public in 1935. The Frick also houses the Frick Art Reference Library, a premier art history research center established in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984).
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum and art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, managed by Glasgow Museums. The building is located in Kelvingrove Park in the West End of the city, adjacent to Argyle Street. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is one of Scotland's most popular museums and free visitor attractions.
The Frick Pittsburgh is a cluster of museums and historical buildings located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and formed around the Frick family's nineteenth-century residence known as "Clayton". It focuses on the interpretation of the life and times of Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919), industrialist and art collector.
Goupil & Cie is an international auction house and merchant of contemporary art and collectibles. Jean-Baptiste Adophe Goupil founded Goupil & Cie in 1850. Goupil & Cie became a leading art dealership in 19th-century France, with its headquarters in Paris. Step by step, Goupil established a worldwide trade in fine art reproductions of paintings and sculptures, with a network of branches and agents in London and other major art capitals across Continental Europe as well as in New York City and Australia. LesAteliers Photographiques, their workshop north of Paris, in Asnières, was instrumental in their expansion from 1869. The leading figure of Goupil & Cie was Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Goupil (1806–1893). His daughter Marie married the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Le Moulin de la Galette is the title of several paintings made by Vincent van Gogh in 1886 of a windmill, the Moulin de la Galette, which was near Van Gogh and his brother Theo's apartment in Montmartre. The owners of the windmill maximized the view on the butte overlooking Paris, creating a terrace for viewing and a dance hall for entertainment.
The International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry was the first of 4 international exhibitions held in Glasgow, Scotland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It took place at Kelvingrove Park between May and November 1888. The main aim of the exhibition was to draw international attention to the city's achievements in applied sciences, industry and the arts during the Industrial Revolution. However, it was also hoped the Exhibition would raise enough money for a much-needed museum, art gallery and school of art in the city. The exhibition was opened by the Prince of Wales, as honorary president of the exhibition, on 8 May 1888. It was the greatest exhibition held outside London and the largest ever in Scotland during the 19th century.
Vincent van Gogh enjoyed making Paintings of Children. He once said that it's the only thing that "excites me to the depths of my soul, and which makes me feel the infinite more than anything else." Painting children, in particular represented rebirth and the infinite. Over his career Van Gogh did not make many paintings of children, but those he completed were special to him. During the ten years of Van Gogh's career as a painter, from 1881 to 1890, his work changed and grew richer, particularly in how he used color and techniques symbolically or evocatively.
Peasant Character Studies is a series of works that Vincent van Gogh made between 1881 and 1885.
Colnaghi is an art dealership in St James's, central London, England, which is the oldest commercial art gallery in the world, having been established in 1760.
Thomas Agnew & Sons is a fine arts dealer in London that began as a print and publishing partnership between Thomas Agnew and Vittore Zanetti in Manchester in 1817. Agnew ended the partnership by taking full control of the company in 1835. The firm opened its London gallery in 1860, where it soon established itself as a leading art dealership in Mayfair. Since then, Agnew's has held a pre-eminent position in the world of Old Master paintings. It also had a major role in the massive growth of a market for contemporary British art in the late 19th century. Agnew's closed in 2013. The brand name was sold privately and the gallery is now run by Lord Anthony Crichton-Stuart, a former head of Christie's Old Master paintings department, New York.
Alexander Reid (1854–1928) was a Glasgow art dealer and amateur artist, and friend of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Vincent van Gogh. He was one of the most influential art dealers in Europe in the early 20th century, exhibiting and selling artworks by some of the finest artists of his period, including the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists. He helped build up the French painting collection of Sir William Burrell. and many of the works he dealt with now feature in major private, civic and national art collections all over the world. Within the Scottish art world he was called Monticelli Reid.
The Grafton Galleries, often referred to as the Grafton Gallery, was an art gallery in Mayfair, London. The French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed the first major exhibition in Britain of Impressionist paintings there in 1905. Roger Fry's two famous exhibitions of Post-Impressionist works in 1910 and 1912 were both held at the gallery.
Realism was an artistic movement that emerged in France in the 1840s, around the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the early 19th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and the exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead, it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. The movement aimed to focus on unidealized subjects and events that were previously rejected in art work. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. Realism was primarily concerned with how things appeared to the eye, rather than containing ideal representations of the world. The popularity of such "realistic" works grew with the introduction of photography—a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look objectively real.
Arthur Tooth & Sons was an art gallery founded in London, England, in 1842 by Charles Tooth (1788–1868).
Charles Carstairs was an American art dealer. Throughout his career, Carstairs encouraged American clients to invest in European Old Master paintings. He worked closely with industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick, and was responsible for Frick's acquisition of the 'Ilchester Rembrandt' in 1906. Carstairs also worked with Joseph Widener, an American art collector and founding benefactor of National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Arthur Joseph Sulley was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn's The Mill.
The De Wild family was a Dutch family of art professionals, including conservator-restorers, art dealers, painters, and connoisseurs. Prominent internationally in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, they were especially known for their advances in art restoration.
Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1850 and retouched in 1865. One of Millet's few painting that is exclusively a landscape, it is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven.
Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap, also known as Man with a Red Cap, is an oil painting by the Venetian painter Titian, made in about 1516. It is part of the Frick Collection in New York City.
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