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THOMAS BROMLEY BLACKLOCK | In the Fairies' Wood
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 USD
Sold
20,000 USD
bidding is closed
Description
- Thomas Bromley Blacklock
- In the Fairies' Wood
- signed T.B. Blacklock and dated 1903 (lower left)
- oil on canvas
Provenance
Sale: Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, August 30, 1983, lot 856, illustrated
Sale: Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, September 1, 1992, lot 958, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale
Sale: Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, September 1, 1992, lot 958, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale
Exhibited
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1904, no. 159
Catalogue Note
This charming and imaginative scene of a wandering girl’s meeting with a gnome reflects the insatiable Victorian appetite for storytelling and depictions of fairies and other mythical beasts in popular culture. Thomas Bromley Blacklock was trained in Edinburgh but returned to his hometown of Kirkcudbright, which lies on the south west coast of Scotland, where the artist "developed into a painter of fairy-tales. He painted pleasant tender fancies expressed with a daintiness of colour and design and an ingenuity and quaintness in costume and accessory" (Peter J. M. McEwan, Dictionary of Scottish Art & Architecture, Suffolk, 1994, p. 77). The present work may be inspired by local Galloway folklore as well as the work of Scottish colorist and member of the Glasgow Boys E. A. Hornel (1864-1933), who led the Kirkcudbright Artists’ Colony, an answer to England’s St. Ives School, which flourished into the mid-twentieth Century.