

PROPERTY FROM AN ENGLISH PRIVATE COLLECTION
John Rowland Fothergill was a close friend of Oscar Wilde’s, both before and after Wilde’s prison sentence, and an associate of the artist William Rothenstein, with whom he opened the Carfax Gallery in 1898. The same year Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross, the art dealer and critic, introduced Fothergill to Edward Perry Warren, the American art collector who donated many of his antiquities to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Fothergill became Warren’s personal secretary for a time and a member of the Lewes House brotherhood (see Osbert Burdett and E.H. Goddard, Edward Perry Warren, The Biography of a Connoisseur, 1941, containing several mentions of Fothergill). Before WWI he lived in Italy, where he met Paul Hartwig and Wolfgang Helbig, two of the most prominent classical archaeologists of their time, both of them involved in collecting and trading classical. Antiquities. In later life Fothergill became an innkeeper, first in Thame, then in Ascot, and finally in Market Harborough. He was renowned as a chef and authored several books on cooking, as well as gardening.