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13. Bartholomew Colles Watkins R.H.A. 1833-1891
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‘Holy Cross Abbey, County Tipperary’
Oil on canvas, 32.5 x 50.5cm
In its original Watts frame of Dublin Manufacture
Signed with Initials and Inscribed by the Artist, Verso
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy, 1891, no. 231 (£40)
Provenance: Private Collection U.S.
One of the most appealing Irish landscape painters of the Victorian period, Bartholomew Colles Watkins was born into an artistic family in Dublin in 1833 and entered the Royal Dublin Society School aged thirteen. He developed a successful practice as a landscape painter, in both oil and watercolour, exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy regularly from 1860 and also showing in London – he sent three views of Killarney to the Royal Academy in 1868, 1870 and 1874. In 1859 Watkins together with his friends John Faulkner (1835-94), Patrick Vincent Duffy (1832-1909), and James Richard Marquis (d. 1885), were hailed as the ‘leaders of a new school of landscape painting’. No doubt thanks to critical success such as this, Watkins was elected an associate of the R.H.A. in 1861 and a full member three years later, taking an active interest in the Academy’s affairs and acting as its Secretary for a period. In addition to painting in Ireland, exhibits at the Academy indicate a trip to Norway in about 1860.
Watkins made a speciality of painting Irish mountainous scenery and portrayals of Connemara, as here, and Kerry predominate in his oeuvre. He made his first sketching tour of Connemara in 1875 and returned frequently. Here in a work exhibited at the R.H.A. in 1889 he shows the stepping stones on Lough Fee. Watkins was clearly taken by the beauty of this part of Connemara, returning several times. In 1874 he exhibited a view of nearby Letterbreckaun. An early adaptor of plein air painting – a practice more usually associated with artists active in the Roman campagna, or at Barbizon, rather than in Ireland – Watkin’s approach to landscape is fundamentally different, more modern, to that of his Victorian contemporaries. Anticipating by several decades several of the qualities of Paul Henry’s depictions of Connemara, Watkins captures the fall of light and the serene stillness of the West of Ireland while the sense of scale and recession is handled with masterly precision. The contrast– but also harmony – between the charmingly anecdotal scene in the foreground and the elementally empty landscape makes for one of Watkins’s most pleasing West of Ireland views.
While excelling at painting the West, Watkins also painted views in Kildare, Westmeath and Wicklow as well as several of Dublin Bay. He also continued to work in the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition, producing meticulous but highly evocative depictions of Ireland’s castles and ecclesiastical remains, exhibiting views of Glendalough, Cashel and Clonmacnoise, while the description ‘recently demolished’ added to his catalogue description of a view of The Old Castle of Baltinglass hints at a preservationist mindset. Here he takes for his subject Holy Cross Abbey, County Tipperary, showing its location on the banks for the River Suir. The abbey takes its name from the fragment of the True Cross donated by Isabella of Angoulême to the original Cistercian Monastery in Thurles, which had been founded, as a daughter house of Monasternenagh, in 1182 by Donal O’Brien of Thormond. Thanks to this relic, the abbey quickly became a site of pilgrimage and, after the Reformation, focal point of Catholic resistance. The abbey was much augmented and ornamented under the Butler Earls of Ormond, and, in its relative intact state of preservation, is regarded as one of the finest examples of Cistercian architecture in Ireland. In 1869 the abbey was designated a national monument but a century later it was returned to the hands of the church. Watkins shows the ruins on a bright sunny day and presents a bucolic picture of cattle grazing within the bawn of the monastery. A single fisherman sitting by a small weir within the river provides the only evidence of human occupation at this ancient site of worship.
Price: Enquire
‘Holy Cross Abbey, County Tipperary’
Oil on canvas, 32.5 x 50.5cm
In its original Watts frame of Dublin Manufacture
Signed with Initials and Inscribed by the Artist, Verso
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy, 1891, no. 231 (£40)
Provenance: Private Collection U.S.
One of the most appealing Irish landscape painters of the Victorian period, Bartholomew Colles Watkins was born into an artistic family in Dublin in 1833 and entered the Royal Dublin Society School aged thirteen. He developed a successful practice as a landscape painter, in both oil and watercolour, exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy regularly from 1860 and also showing in London – he sent three views of Killarney to the Royal Academy in 1868, 1870 and 1874. In 1859 Watkins together with his friends John Faulkner (1835-94), Patrick Vincent Duffy (1832-1909), and James Richard Marquis (d. 1885), were hailed as the ‘leaders of a new school of landscape painting’. No doubt thanks to critical success such as this, Watkins was elected an associate of the R.H.A. in 1861 and a full member three years later, taking an active interest in the Academy’s affairs and acting as its Secretary for a period. In addition to painting in Ireland, exhibits at the Academy indicate a trip to Norway in about 1860.
Watkins made a speciality of painting Irish mountainous scenery and portrayals of Connemara, as here, and Kerry predominate in his oeuvre. He made his first sketching tour of Connemara in 1875 and returned frequently. Here in a work exhibited at the R.H.A. in 1889 he shows the stepping stones on Lough Fee. Watkins was clearly taken by the beauty of this part of Connemara, returning several times. In 1874 he exhibited a view of nearby Letterbreckaun. An early adaptor of plein air painting – a practice more usually associated with artists active in the Roman campagna, or at Barbizon, rather than in Ireland – Watkin’s approach to landscape is fundamentally different, more modern, to that of his Victorian contemporaries. Anticipating by several decades several of the qualities of Paul Henry’s depictions of Connemara, Watkins captures the fall of light and the serene stillness of the West of Ireland while the sense of scale and recession is handled with masterly precision. The contrast– but also harmony – between the charmingly anecdotal scene in the foreground and the elementally empty landscape makes for one of Watkins’s most pleasing West of Ireland views.
While excelling at painting the West, Watkins also painted views in Kildare, Westmeath and Wicklow as well as several of Dublin Bay. He also continued to work in the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition, producing meticulous but highly evocative depictions of Ireland’s castles and ecclesiastical remains, exhibiting views of Glendalough, Cashel and Clonmacnoise, while the description ‘recently demolished’ added to his catalogue description of a view of The Old Castle of Baltinglass hints at a preservationist mindset. Here he takes for his subject Holy Cross Abbey, County Tipperary, showing its location on the banks for the River Suir. The abbey takes its name from the fragment of the True Cross donated by Isabella of Angoulême to the original Cistercian Monastery in Thurles, which had been founded, as a daughter house of Monasternenagh, in 1182 by Donal O’Brien of Thormond. Thanks to this relic, the abbey quickly became a site of pilgrimage and, after the Reformation, focal point of Catholic resistance. The abbey was much augmented and ornamented under the Butler Earls of Ormond, and, in its relative intact state of preservation, is regarded as one of the finest examples of Cistercian architecture in Ireland. In 1869 the abbey was designated a national monument but a century later it was returned to the hands of the church. Watkins shows the ruins on a bright sunny day and presents a bucolic picture of cattle grazing within the bawn of the monastery. A single fisherman sitting by a small weir within the river provides the only evidence of human occupation at this ancient site of worship.