James Stephanoff

signed and dated I. Stephanoff 1817 lower right

Coke Jameson
Edward James, West Dean Park, Sussex
Sotheby's London, July 13, 1989, lot 97, illustrated
Sotheby's London, July 11, 1991, lot 189, illustrated

London, Society of Painters in Water-Colour, 1817, no. 258

Ira Jenkins, "James Stephanoff and the British Museum," Apollo, March 1985, pp. 174-81, illustrated pl. 1

Work is on a heavy stock paper with some mat stains along the extreme edges, small specs of staining or surface dirt in isolated areas of upper register. Work is affixed to mat board with paper hinges along reverse top edge.
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The present work is the first in a series of six works Stephanoff painted relating to the exhibitions of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum.  The series was exhibited at The Old Water Colour Society between 1817 and 1845.  Three are in the British Museum, one in the Collection of Professor and Mrs. Michael Jaffé, and the whereabouts of the fifth is unknown.  None of the series depict actual rooms within the Museum, but idealized settings in which the antiquities are displayed.  The 1817 exhibition caption for the present work reads "The Antiquities are from the Townley and Elgin Collections at the British Museum," although in fact only one sculpture can be identified as forming part of the Elgin marbles (one of the south metopes, leaning against the doorway at left).  The remaining sculptures are taken almost exclusively from the collections of Charles Townley and Sir William Hamilton, which in 1817 were displayed in the Townley Gallery, a suite of rooms built on to old Montagu House at the beginning of the century.  There may have been a direct link between the artist and the collector, for Townley employed a number of artists to record his collection, and some of the resulting drawings (now in the British Museum) are signed Stephanoff del.  While the connoisseur depicted in the present work does not appear to be a portrait of Townley, his house in Park Street, Mayfair may have much later provided the artist with the idea for the present composition.