Although next Wednesday's Irish art sale at Adam's in Dublin features many familiar names - Orpen, Osborne, Swanzy, O'Conor, Yeats, MacGonigal and Le Brocquy among them - the central part of the auction, and its accompanying catalogue, is given over to a less well-known painter, Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples.
The group of no less than 32 lots comes from a collection belonging to one of Staples's great-granddaughters and includes a large number of sketchbooks, plus many individual drawings being offered either alone or in groups. These particular items appear to be separate from those sold by London auctioneers Phillips, which held a Staples studio sale in 1991.
From a family long-settled in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, Robert Ponsonby Staples was born in 1853 and educated by his father until, at the age of 12, he was sent to Louvain Academy of Fine Arts where he remained for five years studying art and architecture. He later spent time as a student in both Dresden and Brussels, showing work at the Royal Academy in London for the first time in 1875 and continuing intermittently to do so for the next quarter century. Some of Staples's largest and most detailed pictures also took him the longest to complete.
In 1887, for example, working with another artist he finished the painting Australia England depicting the 22 cricketers engaged in the match; this now hangs at Lord's in London. The same year, he began another long-term project, The Last Shot for the Queen's Prize, Wimbledon, featuring a total of 56 portraits. Other important works include The Dying Emperor Wilhelm I and Cardinal Manning's Last Reception. However, the pictures for which he is best remembered today, and which feature strongly in the Adam's sale, are Staples's charming drawings and watercolours. These capture with a wonderful vivacity the seemingly Elysian years before the outbreak of the first World War.
As Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin remark in their 1994 book, The Watercolours of Ireland, his style is reminiscent of many French artists of the period, whether the society sketcher Helleu or Boudin and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The last of these certainly springs to mind when looking at such lots as number 47 and 67, called At Empire, London and At the Palas Theatre respectively; both show women in the audience drawn with haste but terrific verve and assurance.
Other theatre-inspired pictures include numbers 64 (Repairing the Curtain at Drury Lane), 66 (Theatre Audience) and 71 (Fred Storey at Alhambra). A more thoroughly worked picture is number 42, Pantomime Rehearsal at Drury Lane executed in watercolour and crayon on board and showing the entire cast of the production standing close to the front of the proscenium arch.
Staples's drawings of women are especially charming and evocative, and as has been stated, are very much after the style of Helleu in France or Gibson in the United States. The elaborate costumes of the Edwardian period offered wonderful opportunities for artists and appear to have provided Staples with endless inspiration. Some of the other lots in this sale are portrait watercolours and sketches of notable men and women from the period, such as Jacob Epstein, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman and Sarah Bernhardt.
Staples's later years, spent back in Northern Ireland, were marred by a severe shortage of money and a falling away of demand for his work as tastes changed. Something of an eccentric - he insisted on walking barefoot for at least 15 minutes daily for the sake of his health and permitted his dogs to sit in the family pew at church - he died in October 1943. The Irish art sale at Adam's on Wednesday begins at 2.15 p.m.
