Lot 27
  • 27

Richard Doyle

Estimate
6,000 - 9,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Richard Doyle
  • May Queen. ca. 1869.
  • pencil,watercolor,paper
Pencil and watercolor study design for In Fairyland depicting the May Queen with her tresses being combed by Fairies and Elves (unused). Measures 5-1/2 x 11 inches on larger paper.

Provenance

Michael Heseltine.

Catalogue Note

Richard Doyle (1824-1883) came from an artistic background, an illustrator from an early age, sketching and drawing scenes of people and events which he kept in journals.  It is well known from age fifteen and worked for the satirical Punch Magazine (1843-1850), creating their famous fairy cover design which was used from mid-century through most of the 1890s.  He illustrated a number of picture books for Mark Lemon, John Ruskin, Thackeray and Dickens, among others, also political and satirical projects, but later concentrated on landscape paintings after his elaborately produced “In Fairyland” did not do well, and taste for illustration was starting to change. He died at age 59.

His father was the famous Irish cartoonist, John Doyle, and his brother Charles Altamont Doyle was also a prolific fairy painter – whose son, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish writer and physician, is most famous for his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

Exhibited: Doyle Exhibition, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (#136); Exhibition of Victorian Fairy Paintings, J S Maas & Co., London, 6 March – 7 April 1978 (#43).