George Richmond, R.A. (1806-1896)
George Richmond, R.A. (1806-1896)

A Damned Soul hanging from a Gothic building

Details
George Richmond, R.A. (1806-1896)
A Damned Soul hanging from a Gothic building
pencil, pen and brown ink and watercolour
2 x 2.7/8 in. (6.4 x 7.3 cm.)
Provenance
By descent to the artist's great-great granddaughter Mrs. Miriam Hartley; Sotheby's London, 18 November 1976, lot 178, illustrated (370).
Literature
Raymond Lister, George Richmond: A Critical Biography, London, 1981, pp. 124-5, illustrated pl. VI, fig. 14.
Robert N. Essich, 'Blake in the Marketplace, 1988', Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, Spring 1999, p. 107.

Lot Essay

The subject and even the direction in which this drawing is to be seen are difficult to interpret. The title used above comes from the 1976 sale catalogue, but could, in view of Richmond's frequent practise of identifying his early works in later life, come from a later inscription. The sale catalogue reproduces the drawing as an upright with the figure's hands at the top. For Lister, is it more likely that 'the view could be taken from above, in which case the figure's feet would be firmly planted on the floor'. This way, his illustration shows the figure with his hands to the left; meaning that the Gothic figures are shown upright, but it could be that the drawing of the figure was superimposed on an existing architectural study. The figure is grasping some kind of implement or tool, but it is difficult to make out what; Lister suggests 'a kind of trapeze, an awl, or even a bar fixed to a wall'. He dates the drawing as probably of 1823, a date supported by traces of an inscription recorded in the auction catalogue but no longer to be seen.

A recent discussion of the drawing suggests a new descriptioin of the figure 'he is seen from above and is standing and bending over to turn a large screw, not "Hanging"' see R.N. Essick, op.cit..

This depiction of repulsive malignity is exceptional in Richmond's work. It may owe something, as Lister suggests, to his master at the Royal Academy, Henry Fuseli, but the scrofulous appearance of the figure's skin may be derived from that on the Giant in William Blake's Christian and Hopeful in Doubting Castle, one of the watercolours in the unfinished series of illustrations to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress that passed, after the death of Blake's widow in 1831, to Richmond's brother-in-law Frederick Tatham (see M. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, New Haven and London, 1981, p. 599, no. 829, the watercolour referred to illustrated pl. 1116).

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