06/18/2026 General, Books & Autographs
NEW YORK, NY -- J.M.W. Turner’s good friend and rival, the great English watercolorist Thomas Girtin, was apprenticed for some years to the artist Edward Dayes. A troubled and onerous period of servitude (it was rumored that Dayes had Girtin arrested at one point, though this has not been substantiated), Girtin none the less persevered in his commitment to Dayes, becoming one of the foremost English watercolorists (a medium that was then emerging as a fine art form) before his premature death in 1802. One positive outcome of their difficult relationship is the work Military Figures No. 1 (lot 107), which depicts the British First Regiment of Foot Guards. This slim volume was engraved after Dayes’s drawings, and the coloring (which was once attributed to Turner himself) was likely undertaken by Girtin, according to current scholarship. The military costumes are set against bucolic backgrounds, as if the soldiers were all out for a day in the English countryside. An exceedingly rare volume of great charm, the plates have all the spontaneity of watercolor sketches, which in essence they are.
A few years after, the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson produced a similar work on military costume, the Loyal Volunteers of London & Environs of 1798 (lot 110), showing the military costume of the various volunteer regiments that had sprung up around London in the wake of the French Revolution. These were intended to prevent a similar uprising from occurring on the London streets, though the English Jacobins were ardent reformers rather than revolutionaries, and the martial valor of these regiments was thus never tested. Though they may never have had to face down howling mobs, they took care to have fun “dressing up as soldiers”; the fresh-faced young men in these plates (some of which are finished with highlights of gold and silver) seem to be taking great pleasure in their finery.
The same year Rowlandson issued a suite of five plates of soldiers, engraved after his designs by Heinrich Joseph Schutz (lot 111). In these plates, such as that showing “Soldiers Marching,” his subject is rather the regular army. In the plate “Private Drilling,” we see a little of Rowlandson the satirist. A freshly recruited country bumpkin, newly kitted out, shows off his uniform to all, while the young daughter of the house gazes coyly at the trim young soldiers accompanying him. Another rare series of Rowlandson prints of The Cries of London, 1799 (lot 112), also published by Ackermann, gives better vent to the splenetic character of the illustrator. For the cry Water Cresses, Come Buy my Water Cresses a clearly dissolute old man, knocking at the door of a brothel on Portland Street, is offered cresses by two young women (one a mere child) while two of the ladies of the house look down on the scene out of a window above, exhibiting vast amusement. All the plates in this important series of cries show evidence of the busy street life of the metropolis, with its pickpockets, thieves, and mendicants. Also included in the sale are two Rowlandson watercolors, lots 213 and 214.
The rich tradition of the English color plate book is further represented in the collection by the superbly bound copy of James Jenkins’s two works on The Martial Achievements… and The Naval Achievements of Great Britain (lot 118) published in 1814 and 1817 respectively. These copies are of the true large-paper issue, one of a possible hundred sets (though far fewer than this still survive), and the extraordinarily fine coloring of the aquatint plates, far richer than the regular paper copies regularly encountered, make these among the best examples of the English color plate literature at the period. William Heath was the illustrator for the Martial Achievements, and this set includes one of his original watercolors for the work; the Naval Achievements features stirring plates of the great naval encounters of the Napoleonic era by Whitcombe. That the books are presented in a regal binding of straight-grain burgundy morocco, lavishly gilt, adds to the allure of this example.
Perhaps a fitting place to draw a close to this discussion is with the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne, represented by Fores' Correct Representation of the State Procession on the Occasion of the August Ceremony of Her Majesty's Coronation, June 28th, 1838 (lot 150). The 33 conjoined aquatints in this panorama span some sixty feet, and the whole is retained in the original publisher’s wallet. It is a remarkable offering, one of several such panoramic processional views in the collection.
Auction Thursday, June 25, 2026 at 10am
Exhibition June 20 - 22
