Beschreibung:

ROBERTS, David (1796-1864)]. A collection of forty-two autograph letters signed addressed to David Roberts (in London, Spain, Alexandria, Bombay and France) by patrons, friends and fellow-artists, including Frank Hall Standish (3 letters), Dominic Colnaghi, John Kinnear (5), Robert Edmonstone (4), William Shiels (2), Sir John Brackenbury (4), and 13 other correspondents, 11 January 1831 - 11 December 1843, altogether approximately 115 pages, mostly 4to , address panels, seals (a few tears, occasional spotting and discolouration). The collection reflects the wide circle of Roberts' acquaintance after his departure from Scotland for London. In September 1832 he went to Spain, and in 1838-39 to Egypt and the Levant. Apart from J.F. Lewis no artist had yet painted widely in Spain and his friend Robert Edmonstone (1794-1834) writing from Rome and Venice to urge him to visit 'this land of painters and macronie', supports his intention to visit Spain that he may be first in the field of recording Moorish Architecture. Frank Hall Standish (1788-1840, collector and author) commissions for a hundred guineas a painting of Burgos or Granada ('Please not to put in weeping willows as Mr Lewis does where they were never known to grow'), and writes of his own considerable collection (later bequeathed to Louis Philippe) that he has over forty Murillos, 22 Zurbaran (one a recent acquisition of the latter's Resurrection from the Carthusian convent at Herez), 'five good Velasquez', and other Spanish masters. At Malaga the consul William Penrose Mark (who had served with Nelson) and his family became close friends, their affection and usefulness to Roberts illustrated in seven letters from 1833-36. At Seville Consul Julian Williams, a collector and amateur artist, and Sir John Brackenbury were his hosts, Williams writing that Wilkie has recommended Roberts to [Washington] Irving, and that his own Murillo self-portrait is wanted by the Emperor of Russia, while Brackenbury discusses works he has purchased by Roberts. From Granada John Hope complains that 'the National Gallery who I wish to buy the Titian have no cash'. Roberts' visit to Egypt and the Levant is recalled in letters by his travelling companions, the Revd. Woolmer Cory, Thomas Cooper VandenHorst, who was in his party on the Nile, and John Kinnear, a Glasgow merchant, who was with him in Syria and at Petra and reminisces entertainingly about their encounters there, comments on Roberts' work and protest against 'London-built Egyptian temples'. Correspondents at home write of Suffolk Street exhibitions, the Royal Academy, Roberts' contract to provide Spanish drawings for Jennings' Landscape Annual , flatteringly received by several of his friends, and other commissions, and two letters by William Shiels (1781-1844, founder of the Scottish Academy) recall his earlier days in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Other correspondents offer theatrical gossip and news of scene painters presumably known to Roberts at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.