Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 29th April 2019

50 40 Thomas Roberts (1748-1778) The Weir in Lucan House, Demesne oil on canvas 39 x 56.5cm (15.5 x 22.25in) Provenance: Christie’s,16th March 1984, Lot 41; James Adam’s, Dublin, 27th March 2002, Lot 41; Private Collection Exhibited: Thomas Roberts, 1748-1777, National Gallery of Ireland, 2010. Literature: William Laffan and Brendan Rooney, Thomas Roberts, Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Tralee, 2009) No. 36 pp.356-7, illustrated. €40,000-€60,000 ($44,943-$67,415) (£33,898-£50,847) In 1772 Thomas Roberts exhibited three works of the demesne of Lucan at the Society of Artists in Ireland in their purpose-built exhibition in William Street. These were among Roberts’s most popular works and today a total of seven works related to the commission survive, most notably the exquisite quartet in the National Gallery of Ireland. It is not sur- prising that this picturesque river landscapes proved so popular. Just four years later Arthur Young, the visiting English agriculturalist, admired it, writing: ‘the wood on the river, with walks through it, is exceedingly beautiful. The character of the place is that of sequestered shade.’ Roberts produced two almost identical versions of the view westward, looking across the weir and featuring elegant couples ambling along the pathway by the River Liffey (National Gallery of Ireland and Private Collection, Laffan and Rooney, Nos 32 and 37). A third version of the scene, the present work, is observed from a viewpoint slightly to the left. It differs radically from the other two. Gentlemen and Ladies and have been supplanted by rustic figures resting on the bank and a drover overseeing cattle drinking from the river. It anticipates a nineteenth-century inclination to produce both ‘gentrified’ and ‘rustic’ version of individual subjects depending on the context in which each work would be viewed. (See Laffan and Rooney, Thomas Roberts, pp.183-84.)