price: U.S. $7,500

HERBERT DALZIEL

1853 — London — 1941

A Few Old Friends

pen & ink and gouache on paper, 1876. Signed.

provenance:
probably the work sold in London by Sotheby's in 1978;
Mary Sayles Booker Braga, an American Anglophile and collector.

Herbert Dalziel was the son of Thomas Dalziel, one of of a Victorian family of reproductive engravers; their firm was known as the Dalziel Brothers. They were illustrators as well as and engravers. But Herbert was a painter and a watercolorist. He studied at the West London School of Art, was influenced by the pre-Raphaelites, and for about a year studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris under Cabanel. He returned to London, was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1887, and exhibited his landscapes and pastorals at the Royal Academy and at the Grosvenor Gallery. Sadly his eyesight was poor and his health bad and consequently he produced very little. His work was rediscovered when in 1978 a sale of works from the Dalziel family was held by Sothebys. Many of those landscapes show the influence of Whistler. Yet this work is fundamentally, uniquely his own and the technique displayed here is nothing short of brilliant.