Sidney Richard Percy (British, 1821-1886). A woodland clearing, north Wales, 1868. Oil on canvas. 24...

Description

Sidney Richard Percy (British, 1821-1886)
A woodland clearing, north Wales, 1868
Oil on canvas
24 x 38 inches (61.0 x 96.5 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: SR Percy 1868

PROVENANCE:
Sotheby's, London, October 3, 1984, lot 44;
Private collection;
Private collection, Spring, Texas, inherited from the above, 2008.

Sidney Richard Percy Williams belonged to the noted Williams family of painters of London, headed by his father Edward Williams, a well-known landscapist who taught him to paint. He debuted at the Royal Academy in 1842 at the age of nineteen, and the next year decided to drop "Williams" from his name to avoid confusion with the work of his four brothers, who were also painters (something two other brothers also chose to do for the same reason).

Indeed, Sidney Percy went on to distinguish himself as an exceptionally talented landscapist, the finest in the family. By the mid-1850s, after having concentrated for more than a decade upon landscapes near the Thames, southwest of London, where the family's home and communal workshop was located, Percy was a well-established artist and enjoyed both critical and financial success. His reputation reached a high point shortly after the Royal Academy exhibition in 1854 when Prince Albert purchased A View of Llyn Dulyn, North Wales, for his wife, Queen Victoria. This royal patronage boosted the artist's prestige since art collectors sought him out for the status of owning a work by someone the Prince Consort had patronized.

As he matured as a landscape painter, Percy increasingly looked for inspiration further afield, in places with greater wilderness which in turn afforded more opportunities for evocative effects of weather and terrain, such as Northern Wales-a location depicted in the present work-Devon, Yorkshire, the Lake District, and the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

In his canvases from the 1860s Percy seems to have become increasingly interested in creating a mood rather than simply a romantic scene. The paintings from his 1868 tour of the Scottish Highlands, for example, illustrate this shift. In his paintings of Loch Awe from that year, Percy abandoned his typical distant perspective of scenery and focused his attention on the figures in the foreground. By doing so, he invited the viewer to identify with the people in the landscape and to participate in it, not just simply observe it. The paintings become evocations of a place and a mood rather than records of topographical and meteorological phenomena. The same can be said of the present painting of Wales from 1868, where the artist has illuminated a stretch of foreground where figures are tending sheep. They exist in a puddle of light, enveloped by rich darkened scenery that undulates in the shadows cast by heavy cloud banks from above. The feeling is one of momentary warmth and wonderment within a vast unknown.


Estimate: $7,000 - $10,000.

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